About the author

Paul Fairfield

Paul Fairfield is Assistant Adjunct Professor of philosophy at Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada) and has taught philosophy at McMaster, Waterloo, and Wilfrid Laurier Universities. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada) and is the author of The Ways of Power (Duquesne University Press, 2002), Moral Selfhood in the Liberal Tradition (University of Toronto Press, 2000), Theorizing Praxis (Peter Lang, 2000), and coauthor of Is There A Canadian Philosophy? (University of Ottawa Press, 2000). He has also published numerous articles and reviews in the fields of political theory, ethics, and contemporary continental philosophy. Fairfield currently lives in Gananoque, ON, Canada.

Death and Life

Name: Death and Life
Brand: Paul Fairfield
SKU: death-and-life
Availability: InStock

Categories: PhilosophyAuthor: Paul Fairfield SKU: death-and-life Category: Philosophy Author: Paul Fairfield

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Death and Life explores our awareness of death, a concept that confronts the mind as nothing else. Drawing from the writings of varied figures including Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche and many others, the book helps comfort us as we contemplate this universal human phenomenon.

About the Book

"What peculiarity of human nature impels us to turn our backs resolutely not only on death, on the price we pay for every choice, and other unpleasant realities, but ultimately on life itself?" As long as death remains a topic of abstract discussion, we are all philosophers. We speak with great detachment of death as an inevitability and certainty, of its mystery and our anticipation of a life beyond this life. Yet death leaves us, as Sigmund Freud observed, "shaken by the unexpected," as if somewhere in the inner recesses of our being we did not altogether believe in the reality of death-most especially our own. Leo Tolstoy pinpoints our difficulty in The Death of Ivan Ilych, when his character observes, "The syllogism...'Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,' had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself."