Your death: An attempt to explain the experience of death

Abstract

Article presents the experience of death from the point of view of the second person (your death) in the context of the problems that arise from Epicurus’s famous thesis that as long as we exist, death is not present and when it is present, we do not exist. The epistemo-logical problem is the possibility of experiencing death. We cannot resolve this problem from the point of view of the first or third person (a dying person cannot experience his/her own death and the death of a stranger is not important to me). In your death, however, the death of a close friend, of a person emotionally connected with me, I can partly experience my own death. We can resolve some of the other problems in a similar manner: the ontological prob-lem (your death is an experience of real nothingness), the axiological problem (your death shows the absolute evil of human death), the moral problem (I am ready to sacrifice my life to rescue you from death) and the eschatological problem (after your death I have an experience of your presence, which leads me to hope for some form of eternal life).