The literature on mortality is among the oldest in philosophy and continues to organize work across philosophy, theology, psychology, and bioethics. The framework engages the principal positions by name; each is taken up again at [§8.7.5](<8.7.5 What is Concluded.md>) once the structural account is in view.

*Epicurean dissolution arguments.* Epicurus (Letter to Menoeceus) and Lucretius (*De Rerum Natura* III) argued that death is not bad for the one who dies because at the moment of death there is no subject for whom it could be bad. Death is not an experience; the dead do not suffer; the symmetry between pre-existence and post-existence shows that neither involves the subject. The argument continues to organize contemporary work on the badness of death (Nagel 1970; Bradley 2009; Feldman 1992; Kagan 2012), with deprivation accounts (death is bad because it deprives the subject of future goods) the principal contemporary response. The framework's reading is that the Epicurean argument identifies a real structural fact — there is no subject after closure — and underspecifies the inside-vantage of the subject *while alive* who registers mortality as structural condition.

*Stoic and Christian meditatio mortis.* The Stoic *meditatio mortis* (Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus) and the Christian *memento mori* tradition both treat sustained contemplation of mortality as constitutive of practical wisdom or spiritual discipline. The frameworks differ sharply on what survives death — the Stoics naturalistic, the Christian tradition committed to an immortal soul — but converge on the practical claim that orienting toward finitude shapes how the life is lived. The framework affirms the practical convergence while siding with the Stoics on the metaphysics: there is no vantage that survives the closure.

*Heideggerian being-toward-death.* Heidegger's (1927) account of *Dasein* as *Sein-zum-Tode* (being-toward-death) makes mortality constitutive of authentic existence rather than an external limit. The position has been extended in existentialism (Sartre, de Beauvoir) and contemporary phenomenology (Critchley 2009). The framework reads Heidegger's claim as naming a structural fact about any sufficiently recursive vantage — not a peculiarity of human existence but what mortality structurally is for any being deep enough to register its own finitude. What Heidegger located in *Dasein* the framework locates in recursion at sufficient depth.

*Becker, terror management, and denial of death.* Becker's (1973) *Denial of Death* argued that much of culture is organized around the management of death anxiety — a thesis subsequently developed empirically as terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon 1986; Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Greenberg 2003). The empirical literature documents widespread defensive responses to mortality salience across hundreds of studies, with continuing dispute about replication and interpretation. The framework's reading is that the Becker-TMT tradition correctly identifies a structural feature of self-modeling at sufficient depth: a being that models itself as a temporally extended subject who will end will have psychological resources organized around that fact.

*Buddhist impermanence and the Hindu doctrines.* The Buddhist traditions (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana) treat *anicca* (impermanence), *maranasati* (mindfulness of death), and *anatta* (non-self) as related practical-philosophical commitments, with sustained attention to mortality as part of the dissolution of self-clinging. Hindu and Jain traditions develop different metaphysics of survival, rebirth, and liberation. The framework affirms the Buddhist practical convergence — mortality contemplation as constitutive of insight — and locates the structural support for the *anatta* claim in the self-model account [§8.5](<8.5 Identity.md>) develops, while remaining neutral on rebirth-related metaphysics that depend on substantive afterlife commitments.

*Survival, soul, and personal identity.* A substantial literature from Locke (1689) forward through Parfit (1984), Williams (1973), Lewis (1976), and Olson (1997) investigates what survival across time consists in and whether anything like a soul, a continuing self, or a person-stage can survive bodily death. Contemporary metaphysics of personal identity remains highly contested. The framework's reading — the closure of the recursion is the closure of the subject, with surviving effects in others and in the structure the life shaped but no vantage that persists — commits to a specific position in this debate, and depends on the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) identification holding.

*The permanence argument for ultimate meaning.* William Lane Craig (2008) argues that a life is not merely difficult but *ultimately* meaningless without a permanence that only survival past death could secure: a purposeful existence that ends is not, on this view, different in the end from one that was never purposeful. This is a distinct claim from the theistic prescriptive accounts taken up at [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>), which locate meaning's authority in a divine command; this version locates meaning's permanence in the subject's own survival, and makes survival the variable that turns a finite purpose into an ultimate one. The framework's reading is that the argument is best tested by holding theism fixed and varying only whether the created subject's own continuation ends at ordinary death or persists into the promised afterlife; that test is run at [§8.7.5](<8.7.5 What is Concluded.md>), where it isolates the wish for permanence, rather than dependence on a divine source, as the variable the argument's own intuitions actually track.

*Bioethics, euthanasia, and the right to die.* The bioethical literature on end-of-life decisions (Brock 1989; Battin 2005; Velleman 1992) divides over whether and when terminating a life can be permissible, on the relation between bodily and biographical death, and on the structure of advance directives across dementia and other identity-disrupting conditions. The framework's modal-depth account of will ([§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>)) supplies a usable framework for thinking about consent under contracted modal depth, without resolving the policy questions specific cases raise.

*Comparative thanatology.* A growing literature documents responses to death in non-human species — elephants revisiting remains (McComb et al. 2006), cetaceans carrying dead calves, chimpanzees attending to deceased infants, corvids gathering around dead conspecifics (Swift and Marzluff 2015), and increasingly invertebrate cases. Disputes are live on what counts as mortality awareness, what counts as grief, and which lineages reach the depth required for either. The framework's reading is that response to others' death is widespread (the depth gradient supports it), while awareness of one's own mortality as a structural fact about one's persistent self requires the self-aware level the chapter's depth-axis passage names.

The literature on mortality divides over the Epicurean dissolution argument, the practical role of mortality contemplation, the Heideggerian constitution claim, the empirical reach of denial-of-death effects, survival and soul metaphysics, the permanence argument for ultimate meaning, bioethical questions of end-of-life agency, and the comparative-thanatology record. The framework commits to specific answers on each; they are taken up again at [§8.7.5](<8.7.5 What is Concluded.md>) after the structural account is in view.


---

← [8.7 Mortality](<8.7 Mortality.md>) | [8.7.2 What is Required](<8.7.2 What is Required.md>) →
