Abstract

This is the first collection of essays of philosophical thanatology that explicitly connects the metaphysical and the ethical questions of death, including some bioethical questions. The volume has four sections, and the discussion moves from historical and theoretical problems to practical issues of bioethics. However, as the editor of the book, James Stacey Taylor, has surely intended, the practical questions discussed are closely related to traditional metaphysical problems, most notably to the questions such as whether death is a harm to the person who dies, whether posthumous harm is possible, and whether the dead can be wronged. Of course, the central idea is not to claim that the discussion of bioethical problems related to death commits us always to consider deeper metaphysical questions first. Rather, the point is simply that in many cases the metaphysical and the (bio)ethical questions of philosophical thanatology are in fact linked. Therefore, a collection that involves deba