Vincent Barry's Philosophical Thinking About Death and Dying is a good first source for an accessible discussion of some of the relevant issues. It will also give you some suggestions for further reading. These two anthologies have some relevant essays: Life, Death, and Meaning edited by David Benatar. Philosophy and Death edited by Robert Stainton and Samantha Brennan. And one recent book on the subject is Mark Johnston's Surviving Death . I'm sure that others will chime in with more suggestions for you, but I hope that these can get you started.

Suppose you just bought a lottery ticket for a drawing tonight. There's not much chance that you'll win, but you could. There is a chance. So would it be rational for you to act, right now, as if you're going to win? Obviously not. Likewise, it doesn't seem rational for you to act, right now, as if you're going to die. What would it mean to act that way? No need to study -- who cares about my future career prospects? No need to show up at work -- who cares if I get fired? No dentist appointments -- who cares if my tooth is going to rot, eventually? No need to save money, no need to go buy food for tomorrow, no need to answer all those emails in my inbox (that last one sounds esepcially tempting at the moment). Caring about oneself means caring about oneself as a whole, a person who exists through time, and thus if you have no special reason to think that you're going to die today, it would seem to be rational to care about one's life as a whole. That's not to say one shouldn't take...

I'm not sure that it's right to describe death without afterlife as "quiet peaceful oblivion." If there is no afterlife, and you cease to exist at death, then there is no you to experience the peace and quiet. If you've ceased to exist, then you have no experiences at all. It's precisely for this reason that philosophers like Epicurus claim that we should not fear death; on his view, all good and evil consists in sensation, and death is the absence of sensation. So, says Epicurus, "death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing ot us, since so long as we exist, death is ot with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist." In short, if you're looking for a quiet, peaceful oblivion, I don't think death is the right place to look...

You raise an interesting question, one that philosophers have worried about. Assuming that there's no afterlife, and that once you're dead you're dead, then how can someting that happens after your death harm you? After all, you're not around to experience it. This presupposes, however, an experiential account of harms. And we might think that there can be harms that exist outside of our experiences. Suppose that your best friend secretly hates you and is talking about you behind your back, although she's perfectly pleasant to you and so her behavior has no effect on your experience. Would you mind? Insofar as you would mind, and I certainly would, then you probably think that harms can occur outside of experience. And so, even though the Marquis no longer has any experiences, maybe he can stil be harmed or benefitted by things that occur. Then again, your institution may not even have any pretense of having a celebration that's for the value of the Marquis himself. It could have value...

One good book to look at on this topic is Fred Feldman's Confrontations with the Reaper . (What a great title, isn't it?) There Feldman engages in an extensive discussion of how hard it actually is to provide a good definition of death. What he calls "the standard analysis" says roughly that death is the cessation of life (or, perhaps, the irreversible cessation of life). But as Feldman argues, this view runs into all sorts of problems. In particular, consideration of cases of suspended animation, fission, and fusion, raises trouble for the standard analysis. When a living cell undergoes fission, is ceases to live, but does it die? When someone contracts to have themselves placed into suspended animation (See, e.g., Suspended Animation Inc. ), they have ceased to live, but have they died? Ultimately, Feldman concludes: "though death looms large in our emotional lives, though we hate it, and fear it, and are dismayed by the thought that it will someday overtake us and those we love, we...

Let me try to tackle a different aspect of your question: Why should we respect the wishes of someone who has died? This depends on how you view harm , and whether you think someone can be harmed after his or her death. One way of thinking about this question is to think about whether someone can be harmed even if that harm does not impinge on their experiences in any way. Think of Truman in the movie The Truman Show , and imagine that the producers of the show were just a little more skillfulat keeping the deception going, so that it really was completely seamless. Truman never knows that he is being deceived, and from his point of view, his life is just find and dandy. So is he harmed by the deception? If, like me, you have the intuition that he is -- even though he doesn't know about the deception at all and even though the deception has no negative impact (in fact, it has quite a positive impact) on his experience -- you have some inclination to accept that harms can exist outside of...

For related discussion of the first of the two thoughts that Alex distinguishes, see the responses to this question .

The reasoning that in the absence of an afterlife it would be irrational to fear death dates back at least to the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who wrote: "Accustom yourself to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil lie in sensation, whereas death is the absence of sensation… Therefore, that most frightful of evils, death, is nothing to us, seeing that when we exist death is not present, and when death is present we do not exist." There is a good collection of essays edited by John Martin Fischer called The Metaphysics of Death on this subject. Of particular interest to you might be the essay "Death" by Tom Nagel. Nagel argues (along similar lines to those used by Peter Lipton above) that there are things that can harm us (and thus that it would be rational to fear) that occur outside of our experience. Thus the mere fact that death is outside of our experience does not mean that it would be irrational to fear it.