New Philosopher

For most of us, for most of the time, we keep it well out of view. We keep death veiled, barely mentioned as a motivator in the daily walks, the frequent medical check-ups, the incessant checking that loved ones are safe. But when death takes away so

In his philosophical poem The Nature of Things, the Roman philosopher Lucretius came up with a simple but ingenious argument to overcome our fear of death. It goes like this: when we die, we cease to exist. Most of us fear that non-existence very muc

There is a race to extend human life, and much talk in scientific circles that humans could be living well past the century mark sometime soon. In the meantime, like clockwork, 6,300 people die every hour – 150,000 a day, 55 million per year. Today,

For the Toraja people of South Sulawesi in Indonesia, death is a very drawn-out affair. When a Torajan heart stops beating, their loved ones do not speak of them as dead – not yet. Rather, they are to’makula, ‘a sick person’, from the point of biolog

On September 10, 1945, Lloyd Olsen was slaughtering chickens on his farm in Fruita, Colorado. Among his unfortunate victims that day was a Wyandotte rooster named Mike. Like many chickens, Mike’s headless body kept running around for a few moments af

Zan Boag: Death is a topic you have certainly focused on over the past eight years in your ‘Dead and Alive’ documentary project about death rituals and how people relate to death around the world. What prompted you to start the project? Klaus Bo: T

A few years ago, I opened the calculator app on my phone and figured out that the standard human lifespan is only about four thousand weeks long. To be honest, I’ve never quite been the same since. Four thousand weeks! Later, when I asked a friend to

I thought I was ready for my father’s death. I thought philosophy had prepared me for it. As the Roman politician and philosopher, Cicero, wrote: “to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare oneself to die”. Sixteen centuries later, the French essa

Last year my 92-year-old grandmother, April, wrote a letter to The Times of London: “Sir, Why do we have to announce, in death notices, that all our loved ones have died ‘peacefully’? Why can’t we be a little more realistic and honest? Why not die gr

Earlier this year an older friend, a philosopher, call him M, decided to end his life. He had been very ill for many months, and the prognosis was bad – only further decline and then death. Worse perhaps, he had become depressed, could no longer conc

When the British Museum in London was in the process of acquiring its spectacular wave-form roof in the late 1990s, I contemplated donating a single triangular pane to sit among some 3,000 other non-identical panes making up the Museum’s iconic ceili

I often go to a friend’s farm in South West England. It is a thrumming, singing place. I like to lie under a tree and look up through the canopy. The air is gritty with the carapaces of flying, flailing things. Breathing is risky, for them and for me

Soon after I became a father, at some point into the first few months of sleepless nights and earlier-than-early mornings, I found myself thinking that my son – my tiny exquisite implacable son, who so often I couldn’t soothe through his hours of tea

What does it feel like to die? I don’t know what it feels like to die because I’ve never died before! But you probably already knew that, didn’t you? Knowing what something feels like is really hard unless you’ve experienced it before. For example,

At this year’s Venice Biennale, Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel’s installation Barca Nostra (Our Boat) is the talking point. The wreckage of the fishing boat departing from Libya on its way to Europe, which sank in the Mediterranean in 2015,

As those I love, and I, approach the end of our lives, we’re going to be faced with decisions about what we want when it comes to end-of-life care. Some people opt for extending life as long as possible; others would prefer a quick exit when it is cl

When Friedrich Nietzsche first met Cosima von Bülow, heavily pregnant, in a white flowing dress on the shores of Lake Tribschen, he was instantly smitten. Richard Wagner had invited Nietzsche to his lakeside residence after meeting him in Leipzig a f

Humans, individually, can be incredibly brilliant, but collectively we’re often puzzlingly stupid. To take a simple, uncontroversial example, we know that the tropical forests, the Amazon and the forests of South-East Asia, are the lungs of the world

Your sorrow is most to be feared when you have retired to your own home: for as long as your divinity is before your eyes, it can find no means of access to you, but Caesar will possess your entire being; when you have left his presence, grief, as th

A POOR feeble old Man, who had crawled out into a neighbouring wood to gather a few sticks, had made up his bundle, and laying it over his shoulders, was trudging homeward with it; but, what with age, and the length of the way, and the weight of his

London, UK All year Dr Gunther von Hagens’s renowned exhibition of real human bodies has sparked curiosity and awe around the world with over 48 million visitors globally. It now has a permanent museum at Piccadilly Circus in London. All anatomica

There are all kinds of green practices and products available these days on the so-called ‘death care’ market. So many, in fact, that in 2005 Joe Sehee founded the Green Burial Council – a non-profit that keeps tabs on the green funeral industry, off

As a philosopher I have read reason’s response to death, and my mind is convinced by the Epicurean rationale that says death is nothing before it happens and we are nothing while it happens. It’s too bad that philosophers are also made of carne y hue