How to Enjoy Yourself and Become Immune to the Harm of Death
Experience world-class philosophy of health: Sign up for one or both of the lectures with professor Alex Voorhoeve from the London School of Economics right here: https://eventsignup.ku.dk/voorhoeve
The topics of the lectures are priority in health, and how to enjoy life without fearing death.
Researchers from the Department of Public Health at KU and other experts contribute to roundtable discussions after each of the lectures.
The second lecture addresses: Can we enjoy life and become immune to the harms of death?
How to Enjoy Yourself and Become Immune to the Harm of Death
Epicurus was famously a hedonist, who posited that the best life involves the greatest pleasures. He also argued that ‘death is nothing to us’. These claims seem to be in tension. After all, won’t death be bad for us if it deprives us of deeply enjoyable time alive? I aim to dissolve this tension, by proposing an Epicurean account of a pleasurable life that renders us immune to death’s harm.
Round table:
- Jeanette Bresson Ladegaard Knox (associate professor, Section of Health Services Research, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen)
- Thomas Gorlen (General Practitioner, winner of the Life & Death Prize 2020)
- Søren Kjær Bruun (PhD, hospital chaplain, Rigshospitalet)
The lectures are free, open to the public and make for the perfect beginning of Culture Night in the Maersk Tower and Copenhagen.
Alex Voorhoeve is Professor and Head of Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He studied economics and philosophy at Erasmus University, Cambridge University, and UCL. He joined the LSE in 2004 and has worked there ever since, though he has held visiting positions at Harvard (2008-09), Princeton (2012-13), the National Institutes of Health, U.S. (2016-17) and Erasmus University Rotterdam (2017-21). He works on the theory and practice of distributive justice (especially as it relates to health), on rational choice theory, moral psychology and Epicureanism. He has acted as a consultant on justice in health to the WHO, the World Bank, and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, among others.