[英语学习]耶鲁大学公开课 哲学课 死亡_death_.doc

Death: Lecture 1 Transcript January 16, 2007 Professor Shelly Kagan: All right, so this is Philosophy 176. The class is on death. My name is Shelly Kagan. The very first thing I want to do is to invite you to call me Shelly. That is, if we meet on the street, you come talk to me during office hours, you ask some question; Shellys the name that I respond to. I will, eventually, respond to Professor Kagan, but the synapses take a bit longer for that. Its not the name I immediately recognize. I have found that over the years, fewer and fewer students feel comfortable calling me Shelly. When I was young, it seemed to work. Now Im gray and august. But if youre comfortable with it, its the name that I prefer to be called by. Now, as I say, this is a class on death. But its a philosophy class, and what that means is that the set of topics that were going to be talking about in this class are not identical to the topics that other classes on death might try to cover. So the first thing I want to do is say something about the things we wont be talking about that you might reasonably expect or hope that a class on death would talk about, so that if this is not the class you were looking for, you still have time to go check out some other class. So here are some things that a class on death could cover that we wont talk about. What I primarily have in mind are sort of psychological and sociological questions about the nature of death, or the phenomenon of death. So, a class on death might well have a discussion of the process of dying and coming to reconcile yourself with the fact that youre going to die. Some of you may know about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross discussion of the so-called five stages of dying. Theres denial, and then theres anger, and then theres bargaining. I actually dont remember the five stages. Were not going to talk about that. Similarly, were not going to talk about the funeral industry in America and how it rips off people, which it does, in their moments of