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In this contribution, I respond to articles published in a Topical Issue of Open Philosophy on Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic by Mario Caimi, Gabriele Gava, and Michael Lewin, who criticize some of the views I put forward in my book Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics: The Dialectic of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In particular, I discuss the “real use” of reason (in response to Caimi), the “regulative use” of principles and ideas of reason (in response to Gava), and Kant’s conception of reason (in response to Lewin).

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This paper offers a partial defence of the Epicurean claim that death is not bad for the one who dies. Unlike Epicurus and his present‐day advocates, this defence relies not on a hedonistic or empiricist conception of value but on the concept of 'existential' value. Existential value is agent‐relative value for which it is constitutive that it can be truly self‐ascribed in the first person and present tense. From this definition, it follows that death (post‐mortem non‐existence), while perhaps bad in some respects, cannot be an existential harm for the one who dies. This paper argues that existential goods are central to any explanation of why life appears good to us from a self‐interested perspective, which means that death is not bad in the very respect in which life is most saliently good (from that perspective). A corresponding error theory shows why this truth is easily overlooked and explains why we tend to think that death is significantly worse than it really is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]