Death

What is the definition of Death?

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Like many terms, there is a variety of definitions, and which is most appropriate would depend on the function or context of its use. A classical definition of death is "separation of the soul from the body." But to someone who denies the existence of an immaterial soul, it would probably be something more like, "Cessation of bodily processes, including those on the cellular level." More fundamentally, death would be the absence of life where there once was life. But then, of course, you'd need a definition of life.

Philosophy has always been concerned with proposing, criticizing and defending definitions (as opposed to asserting them), so these should be taken as opening round suggestions.

One good book to look at on this topic is Fred Feldman's Confrontations with the Reaper. (What a great title, isn't it?) There Feldman engages in an extensive discussion of how hard it actually is to provide a good definition of death. What he calls "the standard analysis" says roughly that death is the cessation of life (or, perhaps, the irreversible cessation of life). But as Feldman argues, this view runs into all sorts of problems. In particular, consideration of cases of suspended animation, fission, and fusion, raises trouble for the standard analysis. When a living cell undergoes fission, is ceases to live, but does it die? When someone contracts to have themselves placed into suspended animation (See, e.g., Suspended Animation Inc.), they have ceased to live, but have they died? Ultimately, Feldman concludes: "though death looms large in our emotional lives, though we hate it, and fear it, and are dismayed by the thought that it will someday overtake us and those we love, we really don't know precisely what death is. The Reaper remains mysterious."

You can find an interesting discussion of the definition of 'death' in Peter Singer's "Rethinking Life and Death." There is a helpful discussion in the first chapter about "The Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death." This committee proposed in 1968 to "redefine" death so that a person who has suffered irreversible loss of all brain function counts as dead, even if the person is still breathing with the help of a respirator. While this proposal met with little resistance, people are much less inclined to say that someone in a persistent vegetative state is dead--even if there is an irreversible loss of consciousness.

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