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Editorial

Life and Death

by Rick Lewis

“Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultán after Sultán with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.”
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Well, we do try to deal with the big themes here at Philosophy Now, and this issue’s theme is Life and Death. Philosophy arises out of the conditions of life, out of the questions that life throws at us in an unending stream. Yet in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, Socrates, in prison under sentence of death, says he isn’t worried about his impending execution because practicing philosophy is “practicing for death.” What does he mean, practicing for death? As Socrates saw it, death is the separation of the soul from the body, and this is also the goal of philosophy: to attain the detachment needed to clearly see the Universe and our place within it; to leave the familiar world behind as we strive to reach the eternal unchanging Forms, of which all earthly things are mere shadows.

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