Thanatology 2200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Clinical Death, Cryonics, Impermanence
2 Oct 2016
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Chapter 19: the meaning & place of death in life. These questions form part of our human reality & underlie almost all human activity. The ancient chinese yin/yang symbol suggests that wherever there is life, there is death, & wherever there is death, there is life. Other responses have involved the attempt to understand just what happens after death, as explored within art, popular culture, folk tales, anthropology, literature, philosophy, religion, & theology. Feifel (1977b) wrote that humans tend to conceptualize death as either: A door: death is a stage along life"s way, a river to cross, a passage from one sort of life to another, a door through which to pass. Socrates believed that humans cannot know but only believe what death means in terms of our continued existence. Homer provided a different description of the afterlife as an unhappy place where the dead have no sense or feeling & are mere phantoms .
