{"id":37015,"date":"2015-05-29T10:08:50","date_gmt":"2015-05-29T14:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/?p=37015"},"modified":"2022-09-27T11:49:03","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T15:49:03","slug":"what-good-is-thinking-about-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/2015\/05\/29\/what-good-is-thinking-about-death\/","title":{"rendered":"What good is thinking about death?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Excerpt<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Stoics had the insight that the prospect of death can actually make our lives much happier than they would otherwise be,\u201d (William Irvine) says. \u201cYou\u2019re supposed to allow yourself to have a flickering thought that someday you\u2019re going to die, and someday the people you love are going to die. I\u2019ve tried it, and it\u2019s incredibly powerful. Well, I am a 21st-century practicing Stoic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019s a little late to the party. Stoicism as a school of philosophy rose to prominence in the 3rd century B.C. in Greece, then migrated to the Roman Empire, and hung around there through the reign of emperor Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180 A.D. \u201cThat Stoicism has seen better days is obvious,\u201d Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University, writes in his book &#8220;A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.&#8221; He stumbled across the philosophy when researching a book on Zen Buddhism\u2014\u201cI thought I wanted to be a Zen Buddhist,\u201d he says, \u201cbut Stoicism just had a much more rational approach.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Read the article from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/health\/archive\/2015\/05\/what-good-is-thinking-about-death\/394151\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Atlantic<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Excerpt \u201cThe Stoics had the insight that the prospect of death can actually make our lives much happier than they would otherwise be,\u201d (William Irvine) says. \u201cYou\u2019re supposed to allow yourself to have a flickering thought that someday you\u2019re going &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/2015\/05\/29\/what-good-is-thinking-about-death\/\" class=\"morelink\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":37016,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2023,715,730],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty","category-news","category-wright-state-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37015"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129704,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37015\/revisions\/129704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}