Problem:
Extended Argument Analysis in an essay format: An extended argument consists of an argument, reasons to support the premises, reckons with strong objections, and typically (but not always) explores alternatives on the issue at hand. In this assignment, for the chosen passage, you must reconstruct the argument and explain how it is an extended argument and then evaluate the argument.
To evaluate the argument you can argue directly that one of the premises is false, that is, offer a reason that makes the premise false and its opposite true, or reject the reason given that is supposed to support the premise. Need Assignment Help?
Topic: death.
Issue: the question of whether death is harmful and bad for us.
Passage:
"Death, then, is nothing to us and does not affect us in the least, now that the nature of the mind is understood to be mortal. And as in time past we felt no distress when the advancing Punic hosts were threatening Rome on every side, when the whole earth, rocked by the terrifying tumult of war, shudderingly quaked beneath the coasts of high heaven, while the entire human race was doubtful into whose possession the sovereignty of the land and the sea was destined to fall; so, when we are no more, when body and soul, upon whose union our being depends, are divorced, you may be sure that nothing at all will have the power to affect us or awaken sensation in us, who shall not then exist-not even if the earth be confounded with the sea, and the sea with the sky.
And even supposing that the mind and the spirit retain their power of sensation after they have been wrenched from our body, it is nothing to us, whose being is dependent upon the conjunction and marriage of body and soul. Furthermore, if in course of time all our component atoms should be reassembled after our death and restored again to their present positions, so that the light of life was given to us a second time, even that eventuality would not affect us in the least, once there had been a break in the chain of consciousness. Similarly at the present time we are not affected at all by any earlier existence we had, and we are not tortured with any anguish concerning it. When you survey the whole sweep of measureless time past and consider the multifariousness of the movements of matter, you can easily convince yourself that the same seeds that compose us now have often before been arranged in the same order that they occupy now. And yet we have no recollection of our earlier existence; for between that life and this lies an unbridged gap-an interval during which all the motions of our atoms strayed and scattered in all directions, far away from sensation." (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things)