ABSTRACT

Some of the phenomena that our lives present to us pose themselves as problems or challenges to make sense of, and to fold into a coherent overall conception of our identities and our possibilities. These challenges may be personal, and parts of endeavours to arrive at a life-mode that may be as satisfactory as life circumstances permit. And they may be conceptual and theoretical, parts of attempts to devise a unified ontological and normative conception of what it is to be a human being. For the philosophical mind they may-arguably, should-be both. An obvious salient such challenge is posed by the ineluctable fact of our deaths. The present paper argues that two independent lines of thinking about death combine to produce a kind of antinomy: they box the attempt to understand the significance of death into a kind of corner from which no adequate emergence seems possible.