Abstract

This chapter discusses the development of philosophical discussions of suicide between the Middle Ages and David Hume’s ‘On Suicide’. In tracing the development of several arguments for and against suicide, it shows that the medieval phase of blanket prohibition met some resistance in Renaissance fictional accounts or renditions of Roman sources, but that early modern philosophers neither absorbed nor countered those arguments. Rather, they returned to a prohibitionist stance with arguments based on assertions about natural rights and duties or the overall goodness of God’s creation. The essay shows that Hume’s argumentation for the permissibility of suicide is an attack on the metaphysical assumptions that led his immediate predecessors to proclaim its impermissibility, rather than a response to traditional medieval arguments.