Death & What Follows
Epicurean Materialism (The Termination Thesis)
Holds that death is the permanent end of the person and of all experience — and, distinctively, argues this means death cannot actually harm the person who dies, since harm requires an experiencing subject and death leaves no subject behind to be harmed.
Proponents
Epicurus, Lucretius, Fred Feldman
Evidence For
A tightly logical argument: if you don't exist, nothing can be bad for you; you don't exist after death; therefore death isn't bad for you — a conclusion Epicurus's follower Lucretius reinforced by pointing out nobody mourns the eons of non-existence before their own birth.
Evidence Against
Most people retain a strong intuition that death IS a genuine harm — a "deprivation" of the good life a person otherwise would have had — even without a subject around afterward to feel deprived, a response philosophers call the deprivation account, still debated as either rescuing or merely restating the original puzzle.
Real Sources
Transmissions
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