ABSTRACT
This chapter deals mainly with both major and minor philosophers, their thoughts on death and immortality, and discusses their basic beliefs and biographical data. It suggests that there is general agreement that a “philosopher” is a person who is reflective, someone who “turns back” on the phenomenon of human existence and examines what many take for granted; someone who questions our ultimate origin and destiny, our place in the cosmos, as well as the cosmos itself. Many novelists, poets, and other writers reflect on human life, their hopes, their joys, and their tragedies. They write on human suffering and death. They may not be professional philosophers; they may not hold an academic rank and professorship at a university; they may have had very little or no technical philosophical education. But they are reflective; they do, as someone once said, explicate the implicit, and many have endured their own personal existential crisis.
