[MUSIC] Death is nothing to us. Now we come to the Epicurean remedy for the fear of death, the second item in the four-fold remedy. Get used to believing that death is nothing to us, Epicurus says in the letter to Menoeceus. By death is nothing to us he means death isn't anything good or bad to us. That is even if it's nothing to look forward to, it's nothing to fear either. It only makes sense to be afraid of bad things. So if death isn't anything bad, we shouldn't fear it. But why should we think that death isn't a bad thing? Epicurus explains as he continues. For all good and bad consists in sense experience, and death is the privation of sense experience. What we have here is a short and simple argument suitable for rehearsing to oneself when reassurance is needed. One, all good or bad consists in sense experience. Two, we have no sense experience when we are dead. Three, so death isn't anything good or bad for us. So there were two premises to this argument. One and two, from which the third step is drawn as an inference. Let's start by considering the premises. The second premise, issues from Epicurus' natural philosophy. Our soul, which animates the body when we are alive and allows it to experience sensations, is a collection of atoms that scatters upon our death. When the entire aggregate of soul and body is destroyed, the soul is scattered and no longer has the same powers. Consequently it does not then have sense perception. Epicurus writes in the letter to Herodotus. >> So like the Aristotelians soul the Epicurean soul does not go anywhere else or continue to have experiences in a disembodied form. It cannot experience anything without being collected together in a body. So there is no sensation or any experience after death. When we are dead, we exist no longer and so do not feel anything. In fact, you don't have to sign on to the details of Epicurus's atomic theory in order to accept premise 2. Anyone who does not believe in the afterlife should find it plausible. Now the first premise of the argument doesn't seem to be as plausible. We will later see that Epicurus is a hedonist, that is, that he thinks pleasure is the only good. Now a hedonist should accept that nothing is good unless you experience it. But why should we accept it? Can nothing bad happen to me if I'm not aware of it? Suppose the project to which I have devoted all my energies in life turns out to be an utter failure. Imagine I've poured all my energies into a foundation to support research into a cure for Ebola. But it turns out the directors have been embezzling the money and not a cent of it has gone to fight the disease. I've had zero impact on the problem that it was my life's work to mitigate. Wouldn't that be a terrible thing? Even if the truth emerges only as I am lying on my death bed and my family and friends conspire to keep me from ever hearing of it. Wouldn't my life have been a better one if my project had not been thwarted? In a different example, does it matter whether your friends really like you, or whether they secretly hate you and mock you behind your back? Wouldn't that be a bad thing to happen to you, even if you never found out about it? Certainly finding out about it would be unpleasant and a bad experience on its own right. But with the badness of that experience, exhaust what's bad about having false friends. Wouldn't it be a better life, one you would prefer to have to have true friends? So these are the sorts of considerations one might advance against the first premise of Epicurus' argument. So if you aren't a hedonist like Epicurus, and you think that what you don't know can hurt you, then this argument against the fear of death has no purchase on you. But it's not so easy to escape from Epicurus' conclusion. Since he offers an alternative formulation of the argument that does not depend on premise 1. After considering a few objections, he restates his position. So death is nothing to us. Since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when it is present, we do not exist. This new version of the argument proceeds as follows. i, nothing good or bad happens to us unless we exist. ii, we don't exist when we are dead. iii, so, death is nothing good or bad for us. So, we get the same conclusion, but slightly different premises. And this time, premises that are much harder to contest. Once again, anyone who does not believe in the afterlife has to accept premise 2. And our new version of the first premise is not vulnerable to the same objections as the first premise in the original argument. Even if we accept that bad things can happen to us, even if we aren't aware of them, we still might find it plausible that for anything to be good or bad for me, I at least have to exist. And that's the reformulated opening premise. How can there be anything good or bad happening to you if there isn't any you for whom they are good and bad. How can death be anything for you to fear if you won't be around when it happens. So are you convinced that death is nothing to be feared?