Defining Death

Abstract

AbstractDefining death as irreversible cardio-circulatory arrest connects death with ability to resuscitate, raises ethical issues about heart-transplants, and tells us rather when death occurs than what it is. I consider whether death is ceasing to exist, whether immortality is natural for human beings, and whether spatio-temporal continuity is necessary for being the same person. That immortality is natural is alien to Jewish thinking in the Bible, where the idea of existence after death developed only with that of God's transcendent existence. Plato's definition of death as the separate existence of soul and body is grounded on his analysis of intelligence. Christian philosophers now accept that intelligence evolved out of sentience and sentience out of inanimate matter; so they may prefer the Jewish view that existence after death is a gift from God dependent on faith; Aquinas perhaps thought faith stands to natural intelligence much as natural intelligence stands to sentience.