Brian asked:

If knowledge is based on experience, how can any living person have knowledge of death?

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A living person can experience death in the world, other people die all the time. We can see the work
of death, the misery it causes. Of course this is only death as experienced from the outside. What
would it be to know death from the Inside? I guess this is what you are asking; What is death like for
me, What can I know about death Itself?

The short answer is Nothing — death itself as you point out is a something 1 will never experience. At
the most I can experience only the process of dying. But death itself is an Experiential blank. Even if
we argue that knowledge is not based in experience only, but by rational inquiry also that doesn't
help: death is the limit of thinking, a kind of border on reality that we push up against And that doesn't
make any sense. You should probably take a look here at my (non) answer to Giles, in this set of
answers — I'll wait 'till you get back.

Okay, If death is a true mystery, unthinkable in itself, what else can we say? (As philosophers we
shouldn't give up when we find things getting a bit rough, this is the place that we should make our
home.)

What is at stake in our attempts to push up against these borders we find? I have said in the past that
what is at stake is our relation to the world, the kind of existence we are subject to, this is important,
but death seems to turn this upside-down. How can something that we have no relation to make a
difference to my understanding of my existence in the world?

I hinted in my answer to Giles that Heidegger and Levinas say interesting things at this point, but of
course that takes us away from talking about death itself and on to talking about what death turns us
towards in turning us away from itself. Of death itself we can only say that it is an enigma, an aporia,
a stalling point in thinking.

Brian Tee

There are cases of people being clinically dead and claiming to have "experienced" dying before
being resuscitated and although it might be said death is the absolute end and there can be no
experience, in a survey it was held that more than half of the people experienced "positive emotions".
What do we say? Deny that what doctor's call clinical death is what we mean by the concept of death
as the end, and claim we know what death is regardless of the experiences of others? That is
conceptual belief which is not based on experience and may turn out to be false.

Rachel Browne