Stay [electronic resource] : a history of suicide and the philosophies against it / Jennifer Michael Hecht.
2013
HV6545 .H372 2013eb
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Title
Stay [electronic resource] : a history of suicide and the philosophies against it / Jennifer Michael Hecht.
ISBN
9780300187090 (electronic book)
0300187092 (electronic book)
9780300186086
0300186088
0300187092 (electronic book)
9780300186086
0300186088
Published
New Haven, Conneticut : Yale University Press, [2013]
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (xii, 264 pages)
Call Number
HV6545 .H372 2013eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
179.7
Summary
Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history's most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our "secular age" in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment's insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Access limited to authorized users.
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Description based on print version record.
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Stay.
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