Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy

Bernard N. Schumacher received his Ph.D. in philosophy and his Habilitation from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he currently teaches. He has also served as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Providence College, Rhode Island, and Lugano. He is the author of A Philosophy of Hope (2003) and has edited and co-edited numerous scholarly works, including L'humain et la personne (2008), Der Mensch und die Person (2008) and A Cosmopolitan Hermit: Modernity and Tradition in the Philosophy of Josef Pieper (2009).

• Part I. Human Personal Death: 1. Introduction; 2. Biological death; 3. So-called 'personal death'; 4. The anthropological challenge of neocortical death; 5. Ethics as the criterion for defining death; 6. Diversity of definitions of death in a secular ethic; 7. Conclusion; Part II. Theory of Knowledge about Death: 8. Scheler's intuitive knowledge of mortality; 9. Heidegger's being-towards-death; 10. Is mortality the object of foreknowledge?; 11. Inductive knowledge of death and Jean-Paul Sartre; 12. Knowledge of mortality is inseparable from the relation to the other; 13. Death as the object of experience; Part III. Does Death Mean Nothing to Us?: 14. The 'nothingness of death': Epicurus and his followers; 15. Discussion of experientialism and the need for a subject; 16. Death: an evil of privation; Conclusion.

'I strongly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the philosophical discussion of death or simply an interest in the meaning of his or her own death.' John P. Lizza, Mind