Online research in philosophy

Death and Philosophy presents a wide ranging and fascinating variety of different philosophical, aesthetic and literary perspectives on death. Death raises key questions such as whether life has meaning of life in the face of death, what the meaning of "life after death" might be and whether death is part of a narrative that can be retold in different ways, and considers the various types of death, such as brain death, that challenge mind-body dualism. The essays also include explorations of Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan perspectives on death and why death in some cultures, such as in Mexico's day of the dead, is celebrated.

The death by assisted suicide in Switzerland of Australian Dr. John Elliott, in early 2007 has highlighted the inadequacy of the law pertaining to medical decisions at end-of-life, both from a legal as well as ethical perspective. Despite being illegal in most jurisdictions around the world, physician-assisted death is a reality, in part because of the flexibility, inconsistent application and, at times, invisibility, of laws surrounding it. The appropriate response to this should be greater transparency by a reform of the law.

The article tries to explain Wittgenstein’s thesis “death is not an event in life.” Death is neither a positive nor a negative fact, but a one-time event. Death is an event, which, not belonging to the world, constitutes the limit of all possible experience, and as such, it is inaccessible to any form of consciousness. Whileconstituting the end of the subject as a prerequisite of the world, death is also the final annihilation of existence as such. The above analysis shows that Wittgenstein is a transcendental idealist. According to him death is not an event in life because: (1) it is the death of the subject, and the transcendental subject does not belong to the world, (2) the transcendental subject is a condition of the world, so the death of the subject is the end of the world.

Physicians and families need to interact more meaningfully to clarify the values and preferences at stake in advance care planning. The current use of advance directives fails to respect patient autonomy. This paper proposes using the family covenant as a preventive ethics process designed to improve end-of-life planning by incorporating other family members—as agreed to by the patient and those family members—into the medical care dialogue. The family covenant formulates advance directives in conversation with family members and with the assistance of a physician, thereby making advance directives more acceptable to the family, and more intelligible to other physicians. It adds the moral force of a promise to the obligation of respecting a patient’s preferences about end-of-life care. These negotiations between patient, family, and physician, from early planning phases through implementation, should greatly reduce the incidence of family disagreements on what the patient would have wanted. The family covenant ensures advance directive discussions within the family, promotes and respects the autonomy of other family members, and might even spur others in the family to complete advance directives through additional covenants. The family covenant holds the potential to transform moral quagmires into meaningful moral conversation. J Am Geriatr Soc 51:1155–1158, 2003.

Surely there must be some mistake -- Just let your angst be your umbrella -- Death? the way to go! -- Heidegger-dog, ziggity-boom, what you do to me -- Spin your own immortality -- The eternal now -- Plato, the godfather of soul -- Heaven, a landscape to die for -- Tunnel vision -- The original knock-knock joke -- Beating death to the punch -- Immortality through not dying -- The end.

The philosophy of our proposal are as follows: (1) Various ideas of life and death, including that of objecting to brain death as human death, should be guaranteed. We would like to maintain the idea of pluralism of human death; and (2) We should respect a child’s view of life and death. We should provide him/her with an opportunity to think and express their own ideas about life and death.

This paper argues that the world-wide debate about physician assisted dying is missing a golden opportunity to focus on the orchestration of the end of life. Such a process consists of far more than adequate pain control and is a skill which, like all other skills, needs to be learned and taught. The debate offers an opportunity to press for the teaching of this skill. Beyond this, the desire to assure that all can have access to palliative care makes sense only within the embrace of a universal health-care system and the desire that all can have a death with dignity is meaningful only within the embrace of a life with dignity.