Paraphrase the premises and the conclusion of the following extended argument an
Paraphrase the premises and the conclusion of the following extended argument and reconstruct it in standard form. If you want, you can treat it as two or three separate arguments. After you’ve reviewed it, let me and your classmates know what you think. Is is convincing? Why or why not? [NOTE: you will not be able to see your classmates’ responses until you yourself respond]
Get used to believing that death is nothing to us. For all good and bad consists in sense-experience, and death is the privation of sense- experience. Hence, a correct knowledge of the fact that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life a matter for contentment, not by adding a limitless time [to life] but by removing the longing for immortality. For there is nothing fearful in life for one who has grasped that there is nothing fearful in the absence of life. Thus, he is a fool who says that he fears death not because it will be painful when present but because it is painful when it is still to come. For that which while present causes no distress causes unnecessary pain when merely anticipated. So death, the most frightening of bad things, is nothing to us; since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it is relevant neither to the living nor to the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist.
— Epicurus (341-270 BCE), Letter to Menoeceus 124-25 (trans. Inwood and Gerson)
End your post with a QUESTION to help your classmates reply to your post. Are you struggling with something from the reading? Do you have a question about the passage above?
