NEW HAVEN >> When Yale University professor Shelly Kagans course on the philosophy of death was posted as one of Open Yales free online offerings, he couldnt anticipate what would happen next.

The course, followed by the 2012 publication of the book Death by Yale University Press, brought Kagan celebrity status in South Korea, and he has become popular in China as well.

Kagan was brought to Seoul to appear on South Korean radio and television 10,000 people requested tickets for a 3,000-seat studio and gave a series of lectures for which people would be lined up around the block, waiting for the chance to get in to hear me.

This summer, Kagan went to China to give an intensive weekend class at the Yale Center Beijing, which was streamed live by 25,000 people.

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Kagan has sold 13,000 copies of the English edition of Death, according to Yale University Press, but more than 230,000 copies in foreign editions, including translations in both mainland Chinese and Taiwanese characters, Korean and Japanese.

It was a level of fame that I never, ever anticipated, Kagan said the fact that people around the world know me and think about me and write me emails about the class, on a subject that Americans try to avoid thinking about much of the time, based on a course hes given about 10 times in his 22 years at Yale. The course is available at http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-176.

Its been just extraordinarily gratifying and humbling, to be honest, said Kagan, 63, who lives in Hamden. I talk about a wide variety of subjects in this class and some of them are emotionally fraught.

Kagan has several theories about why the subject of mortality and what, if anything, happens after we die has become so popular in South Korea and China.

A part of the answer I think is both of these countries have reached a certain stage in their development where moral questions, questions about life, have come to the fore, Kagan said. You had a couple of generations who were devoted to rebuilding the economy.

Now, those in their 20s and early 30s, who are a large part of his fan base, are wondering, Whats it all about? Whats worth going after? he said. What makes one life more valuable than another? These questions became really important, but theyre not part of Korean education.

Kagan said that in both cultures, the educational system does not emphasize philosophical questions to the extent that the emphasis tends to be on classical Asian figures like Confucius. Here Im inviting people to think about philosophical questions on their own.

Also, Yale is the foremost university, I believe, from the point of view of the educated Chinese.

Finally, he speculates that his presentation may be appealing. Starting out by sitting cross-legged on his desk, I get excited and I jump off the desk and start bouncing around the room, he said.

In his course and book, Kagan asks, What conclusions might you reach about the nature of death? What can we know about death just from thinking about it, based on the available evidence? What conclusion would you come to if you were just using your basic reasoning capacity, religion aside.

He addresses the idea of the soul, or whats the possibility of surviving life without my body? Its the idea of dualism, that there are these two kinds of things, bodies and minds and that they are separate. In that case, the mind could continue to exist if the body gets destroyed.

Or perhaps the mind is just a function of the body. Using the analogy of a smile, which is a thing that your lips, your teeth and tongue can do, Kagan said, If were just bodies that can do these fancy tricks, then the mind must die with the body. In order to know if death is really the end, we need to think about what pieces are we made of, he said.

Another question Kagan raises is, Can you survive the death of your body? He suggests imagining that weve learned how to grow synthetic bodies and that weve also learned how to program the body so we could first upload your memories, your beliefs into a computer and download them into the newly created body.

The question we need to ask is, is that [you] that woke up? If you think that the key to personal identity is personality, then of course its [you].

Another part of the course asks, Does it make sense to be afraid of death?, Kagan said. I lay out some of the conditions that I believe fear has to meet if fear is going to be justified and then I try to persuade them that one of those conditions, or maybe more than one, isnt met when you talk about fear of death.

His conditions include that the thing youre afraid of needs to be dangerous or bad. Second, theres got to be a nontrivial chance that the bad thing will happen.

While it could be argued that death meets those conditions, Kagan said, The third condition is more controversial. Its a cousin of the second condition. Its that the bad thing cannot be certain. If its certain, then fear doesnt make sense. Fear of the fact that you will be dead at some point doesnt make sense because its certain that you will be dead at some point.

Finally, Kagan discusses suicide. He believes that there are cases in which suicide makes sense.

We all think that some lives are better or worse than others, he said. Wed all rather be healthy than sick. Could there be a life that is so bad that youd be better off not existing at all? Such people might be those who are in the late stages of a terminal illness or who are sinking into dementia and who see that the time will come where whats left of my mind or whats left of me will cease to exist.

He does add a caveat that even if suicide would make sense from a self-interested point of view, it might not be morally legitimate.

Of the thousands of messages hes received, Kagan said some of the emails that have moved me the most have been from people who have lost family members to suicide. They have often stumbled on my discussions and are thanking me for discussing it calmly.

One came from the family of a former soldier who had sought help, had therapy but ultimately committed suicide. As they were going through the brothers effects they came upon a journal where he was thinking about the pros and cons of killing himself.

The family discovered that the man had used Kagans book to weigh whether or not to take his own life. While Kagan feared the family would be angry at him, much to my surprise and gratitude the woman ended up by saying their brother had made his decision rationally He had thought it through carefully and they were grateful for that. She wasnt saying whether he had made the right decision or not.

Kagan provided tools to think about the question in a calm fashion If people of one kind or another have found the discussion helpful, I found that very humbling, he said.

Call Ed Stannard at 203-680-9382.

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Asian interest breathes new life into Yale professor's course about death - New Haven Register