Description
This book contributes to current bioethical debates by providing a critical analysis of the philosophy of human death. Bernard N. Schumacher discusses contemporary philosophical perspectives on death, creating a dialogue between phenomenology, existentialism and analytic philosophy. He also examines the ancient philosophies that have shaped our current ideas about death. His analysis focuses on three fundamental problems: (1) the definition of human death, (2) the knowledge of mortality and of human death as such, and (3) the question of whether death is 'nothing' to us or, on the contrary, whether it can be regarded as an absolute or relative evil. Drawing on scholarship published in four languages and from three distinct currents of thought, this volume represents a comprehensive and systematic study of the philosophy of death, one that provides a provocative basis for discussions of the bioethics of human mortality.
Chapter
3. So-called personal death
3.1. The Distinction Between “Human Being” and “Person”
3.2. John Locke’s Philosophical Anthropology of the Person
3.3. Personal Death as the Irreversible Loss of Self-Consciousness
4. The anthropological challenge of neocortical death
4.1. A Dualistic Anthropology
4.2. The Dead Person Recognized as a “Social” Person
4.3. Personal Death as the Permanent Cessation
of Circulatory-Respiratory Function
5. Ethics as the criterion for defining death
5.1. The Ethic of Interests
5.2. Ethics and the Definition of Death
6. Diversity of definitions of death in a secular ethic
Part Two Theory of Knowledge About Death
2 Scheler’s Intuitive Knowledge of Mortality
2. Modern man’s attitude toward death itself
3. The certainty of mortality based on observation and induction or on intuition
4. Problematic questions raised by Scheler’s thesis of an intuitive knowledge of mortality
3 Heidegger’s Being-Towards-Death
1. The distinction between ontical and ontological
2. The impossibility of experiencing my own death
3. The death of another as a possible object of thanatological knowledge
4 Is Mortality the Object of Foreknowledge?
5 Inductive Knowledge of Death and Jean-Paul Sartre
1. The realist and idealist concepts of death
2. The expectation of my death
3. Death as another’s victory
4. Death as a situation-limit
6 Knowledge of Mortality Is Inseparable from the Relation to the Other
7 Death as the Object of Experience
1. Mutual exclusiveness of the states of life and death
2. The meaning of the expression “my death”
4. Love as the unveiling of what is unthinkable about death
5. The phenomenology of death
Part Three Does Death Mean Nothing To Us?
8 The “nothingness of Death” Epicurus and His Followers
1. Presuppositions of the Epicurean thesis of the “nothingness of death”: materialism, hedonism, and experientialism
2. “Death is nothing to us”
4. Modern thinkers: Montaigne, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and others
9 Discussion of Experientialism and the Need for a Subject
1. The a priori character of the Epicurean assertion that death is nothing to us
2. First series of examples against experientialism: comparisons between two states of life
3. Second series of examples against experientialism: comparisons between a state of life and a state of death
4. Third set of possible arguments against experientialism: posthumous evils
5. The subject of posthumous evils
10 Death: An Evil of Privation
1. Of what does death deprive the subject?
2. Is death always an evil?
2.1. Death as an Evil Depending on the Circumstances
2.1.1. An Evil Determined by a Calculation of the Subjective Value of the Life
2.1.2. An Evil Determined According to the Categories of Accidental and Natural
2.1.2.1. The idea of natural death
2.1.2.2. Objections to the ‘critical theory of death’
2.1.2.3. Clarification of the terms ‘natural’ and ‘accidental’ as applied to death
2.1.2.4. The problem of natural death
2.2. Death as an Evil in Itself
3. Defense of the characterization of death as an evil in view of the peaceful state of prenatal nonexistence
Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy
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