Ondřej Kvapil
SUMMARY
Unthinkable…? A Brief Meditation on Death
The question of death is as old as philosophy itself. Yet the prominent thinkers of the tradition, from Augustine to Derrida, have tried to convince us that death cannot be properly thought of. In the present text, I attempt to put this conclusion into question. In the first step, I lay out the general and implicit premises that underlie the thesis of the unthinkability of death. In the second one, I discuss a little-known yet powerful argument that Sartre offers in support of this thesis in the second part of his Critique de la Raison dialectique. I refute this argument so to show, not only that, indeed, death can be thought of, but also what it means to think about death.