in Robert L. Perkins (ed.) International Kierkegaard Commentary: Prefaces/Writing Sampler and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2006) pp.387-417
This paper contrasts Kierkegaard's response to Epicurean indifference to death in "At a Graveside" with attempts in contemporary analytic philosophy to overcome Epicurus' challenge to the rationality of fearing death. I argue that attempts by Nagel, Pitcher, Feinberg etc. to show why death is a harm rely on a narrative understanding of life that, according to Kierkegaard, is unavailable with respect to one's own death. Kierkegaard's approach, by contrast, involves becoming phenomenally co-present with one's own death via a specific mode of "earnest" contemplation.