On Responding Ultimately to Ultimate Questions

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Notes

1. Kant, in “Conflict of the Philosophy Faculty,” together with the essay “Conjectural Beginning of Human History.” In his essays Kant shows that the story of Adam and Eve portrays the beginning of human history as the creation of the moral law of practical reason.

2. How different this is from Schopenhauer who holds that death is the true end of life. It is also important to remember that Plato demonstrates in the Phaedo that the only true philosopher is a dead philosopher; that Oedipus the King ends with the chorus chanting: count no man happy until he is dead; and that Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics acknowledges the truth of Solon’s observation that no one can be happy in this life, i.e., without seeing the end (in death).