Amazon Book Description
- Death has long been a pre-occupation of philosophers, and this is especially so today. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death collects 21 newly commissioned essays that cover current philosophical thinking of death-related topics across the entire range of the discipline.
- These include metaphysical topics – such as the nature of death, the possibility of an afterlife1, the nature of persons, and how our thinking about time affects what we think about death – as well as axiological topics, such as whether death is bad for its victim, what makes it bad to die, what attitude it is fitting to take towards death, the possibility of posthumous harm, and the desirability of immortality.
- The contributors also explore the views of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato and Epicurus on topics related to the philosophy of death, and questions in normative ethics, such as what makes killing wrong when it is wrong, and whether it is wrong to kill fetuses2, non-human animals, combatants in war, and convicted murderers.
Book Comment
Oxford University Press; Reprint edition (1 Sept. 2015)
"Belshaw (Christopher) - Death, Value, and Desire"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Bergstrom (Lars) - Death and Eternal Recurrence"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - Introduction: Philosophy of Death"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Broome (John) - The Badness of Death and the Goodness of Life"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
Author’s Introduction
- What harm does death do you? To put the question differently: when you die, what do you lose by dying? To put it differently again: when you do not die, what do you gain by continuing to live? The question of what harm death does you is the same as the question of what good is done you by living. It is the question of the goodness of your life.
- Two extreme answers can be given. One is “everything”; we might think that, for you, your life is everything, and by dying you lose everything. Another is “nothing”; we might think that you lose nothing by dying. I shall start by rejecting these extreme answers. Then I shall go on to the moderate, quantitative answer that I favor.
Author’s Conclusion
- When you die, what you lose is neither nothing nor everything. It is the rest of your life. The badness of this loss is, seen differently, the goodness of rest of your life. More accurately, it is the difference between the goodness of the longer life you would have led, had you survived, and the shorter life you do lead. So the question of how bad is death transmutes into the question of how good is life.
- I have not tried to answer this latter question, but I have outlined and classified some of the answers that are available.
Paper Comment
For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File1.
"Draper (Kai) - Death and Rationaal Emotion"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Feldman (Fred) - Death and the Disintegration of Personality"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
Author’s Introduction
- Quite a few years ago, in another context and while thinking about other things, I said that I thought that there are some dead people. Not ghosts. Not restless spectres. Just corpses1. I said that I thought that in typical cases people go on existing as corpses2 for a while after they die. I mentioned that a mummy might go on existing for quite a long time. A mummy would be a dead person, right?
- Some of my friends thought this was a totally crazy notion. They insisted that no mummy could be a person! No mouldering corpse3 could be a person! A corpse4 might be the left-over remains of a person, but it could not actually be a person.
- To avoid pointless conflict, I retreated to what I assumed would be a less provocative position. Instead of saying that there are dead people, I maintained merely that there are some dead things that formerly were people. In effect, I said that something could be a person for a while and then (around the time of its death) it could stop being a person but could go on existing as a corpse5 for a while. Or, if in ancient Egypt, for a long time.
- My friends then thought they had me cornered. My view was untenable. For I had admitted that when something that has been a person dies, it stops being a person. Surely I would have to agree that if a thing that has been a person stops being a person, it must go out of existence. No one can survive the loss of personality. Thus, I would have to admit that when a person dies, he or she goes out of existence.
"Fischer (John Martin) - Immortality"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Gilmore (Cody) - When Do Things Die"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
Author’s Introduction
- Many different projects have been pursued under the heading "the definition of death." Those who pursue these projects differ in what they are trying to define and in what sense they are trying to define it. Some take their target to be a notion of death that applies only to human beings or only to persons. Some try to "define" their target merely in the epistemic sense of specifying a reliable and easily detectable mark or indicator of it.
- This chapter pursues a more general and metaphysical project. My central target will be dying, the concept (or property or relation) expressed by the verb "to die" as it occurs in sentences in the perfective aspect, such as "Mary died at midnight." I assume that this is a general biological concept that applies univocally across a wide range of entities, including human beings, cats, trees, bacteria, and individual cells (e.g., human skin cells) that are not organisms. These things all die, in the same sense of "die." My main concern in the chapter is not to define the word "die" or to analyze the concept it expresses. Rather, it's the project of giving informative, metaphysically necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to die at a time.
"Hanser (Matthew) - The Wrongness of Killing and the Badness of Death"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Johansson (Jens) - The Timing Problem"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Kamm (F.M.) - The Morality of Killling in War: Some Traditional and Nontraditional Views"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Luper (Steven) - Retroactive Harms and Wrongs"
Source: Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death; ed. Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson (OUP, 2015), pp. 317-335
Author’s Introduction
- According to the immunity thesis, nothing that happens after we are dead harms or benefits us. It seems defensible on the following basis:
- If harmed (benefitted) by something, we incur the harm (benefit) at some time.
- So if harmed (benefitted) by a postmortem event, we incur the harm (benefit) while alive or at some other time.
- But if we incur the harm (benefit) while alive, backwards causation1 occurs.
- And if we incur the harm (benefit) at any other time, we incur it at a time when we do not exist.
- Yet nothing incurs harm (benefit) while nonexistent.
- And nothing is causally affected at one time by events that occur at a later time.
- So no postmortem event is ever bad (or good) for us (the immunity thesis).
- Despite its plausibility, I mean to resist this argument. I will reject premise 1 on the grounds that dying may be atemporally bad for us. I will also reject premise 3. Some postmortem events are bad for some of us while we are alive. But I am not going to report some new exotic particle that makes backwards causation2 possible. As far as I know, 6 is true. If an event is responsible for a harm that we incur before the event itself occurs, it might be said to harm us retroactively; if when or after it occurs, it might be said to harm us proactively. My view is that some postmortem events harm us retroactively, but without backwards causation3
- Premise 6 is not the only thing worth retaining. I will salvage other bits of the argument for the immunity thesis, too, and put them to use in support of the claim that postmortem events do not harm anyone proactively. As I see things, postmortem events harm us retroactively or not at all.
Paper Comment
For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File4.
"Marquis (Don) - Abortion and Death"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Matthews (Gareth B.) - Death in Socrates, Plato & Aristotle"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Mitsis (Phillip) - When Death Is There, We Are Not: Epicurus on Pleasure and Death"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
Paper Comment
Epicurus
"Norcross (Alastair) - The Significance of Death for Animals"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Olson (Eric) - The Person and the Corpse"
Source: Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death; ed. Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson (OUP, 2015), pp. 80-96
Author’s AbstractWhat happens to us when we die, if there is no afterlife1? We might cease to exist, or continue existing as corpses2. The view that we become corpses3 is hard to defend, because it makes it hard to say what our identity over time could consist in. The view that we cease to exist is little better: it seems to imply that there are no such things as corpses4. A satisfying metaphysics of death is elusive.
Sections
- The Person and the Corpse5
- Pluralism
- Speaking of the Dead
- The Person/Body Argument
- The Essentialism Argument
- The Psychological-Continuity Argument
- The Dead-Animal Argument
- Animals and Corpses6
- The Annihilationist’s Dilemma
- Animal Identity
- The Historic-Dependence Account
- Troubles for Historic Dependence
- Pluralism and Corpse7 Eliminitivism
Paper Comment
"Rosati (Connie S.) - The Makropulos Case Revisited: Reflections on Immortality and Agency"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Sider (Ted) - The Evil of Death - What Can Metaphysics Contribute"
Source: Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death; ed. Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson (OUP, 2015), pp. 155-167
Author’s Introduction
- Will a clear view of what death is help us decide whether it is bad? Not necessarily. The discovery that death = X might instead affect our appraisal of X, leaving our appraisal of death untouched.
- Learning which quantum theory1 correctly describes human bodies would not affect anyone’s attitude toward his or her loved ones. On the other hand, a child’s discovery of the nature of meat (or an adult’s discovery of the nature of soylent green2) can have a great effect. In still other cases, it is hard to say how one would, or should, react to new information about the underlying nature of what we value — think of how mixed our reactions are to evidence of cultural determinism or atheism, or of how mixed our reactions would be to learning that we all live in the Matrix. (Maybe there is no objective fact about how we should react. Derek Parfit3’s (1984, section 95) fear of death diminished when he became convinced of certain theses about the metaphysics of personal identity. Perhaps there is no objective fact of the matter as to whether this was rational; perhaps it was rational for him but would not be for others.)
- What can metaphysics contribute to the question of the evil of death? It cannot, on its own, settle the question, since there is no simple rule telling us how to adjust value in light of new information about underlying nature. Given a clear view of the nature of death, there will remain the question of its disvalue. However, metaphysics can help us attain this clear view. Moreover, a clear conception of what metaphysical positions do and don’t say, and a clear conception of how metaphysics works in general, can remove impediments to a rational appraisal of the evil of death.
Paper Comment
In-Page Footnotes ("Sider (Ted) - The Evil of Death - What Can Metaphysics Contribute")
Footnote 2:
"Sorensen (Roy) - The Symmetry Problem"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Tännsjö (Torbjörn) - Capital Punishment"
Source: Bradley (Ben), Feldman (Fred) & Johansson (Jens) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death
"Zimmerman (Dean) - Personal Identity and the Survival of Death"
Source: Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death; ed. Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson (OUP, 2015), pp. 97-153
Author’s Introduction
- The argument for a Protean criterion of identity1 (section 4), shall, I hope, be of interest to anyone who takes seriously the idea that we might persist by means of temporal parts. But, beyond the argument for Proteanism, the conclusions of the chapter will be of greatest interest to those who think there is, or may well be, a God. Most of today’s atheists are materialists; and the forms of survival-for-materialists that shall emerge require miraculous events. Furthermore, my conclusions about the prospects of survival-for-dualists provide little comfort for (that rare bird!) the dualist atheist. A person’s mental life evidently depends upon her possession of a living, healthy brain; so, even if she is an immaterial thinking thing, it seems unlikely that she could go on thinking after the destruction of that organ — barring, once again, some miracle. Without God in the picture, dualism by itself would not lead us to expect any very meaningful kind of survival of death2.
- Some philosophers have taken materialism to be obviously true, and to be incompatible with our enjoying any kind of life after death3 — thus providing a knock-down argument against the existence of a good God who will right wrongs and explain the meaning of our earthly circumstances in the afterlife4. If I am right, these arguments would fail, even if materialism were as obvious as many take it to be. So the chapter should interest atheists who make use of such arguments — however quaint they may find the supernatural machinery that I frequently wheel in.
Paper Comment
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)