The Church
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 61, No. 1 – Fall 2018
Editor: W. Madison Grace II
Edited by Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 reprint. xii + 502 pages. Hardcover, $170.00; Paperback, $50.00.
Bringing together 22 scholars, editors Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson have given us a very engaging philosophical contribution to the philosophy of death. As the editors tell us in the introduction, the philosophy of death is not an orthodox branch of philosophy, since the philosophy of death is “intersubdisciplinary”, unlike strict metaphysics and ethics. The pivot of this volume is for analytical metaphysics and ethics to contribute to more precise conceptual analyses of death.
The approach is good because the more subdisciplines interact with each other, the more such subdisciplines can benefit and flourish. However, the goodness of such an approach contrasts with the book’s restricted diversity of thematic perspectives. In a handbook such as this, one expects the variety of the contributions to come from as many subdisciplinary perspectives as feasible in the space allotted. What one finds, however, is an excessively cramped focus on only a limited set of topics from a limited set of thematic perspectives. Enlarging the handbook’s scope would have greatly helped with clarifying the multifaceted nature of death itself. Nonetheless, such limited scope is enthralling within the boundaries of its exploration.
The strength of the present volume is twofold, as we will show in what follows. First, the authors represent a diversity of proposals within the few thematic horizons wherein they conduct their investigations. Second, the handbook offers the reader the first constructive treatment on the subject of death nurtured, almost entirely, within the analytic tradition.
The first theme of the handbook treats what death itself is. Cody Gilmore’s “When Do Things Die?” investigates when things die by helping us find metaphysically necessary and sufficient conditions for the timing of death, construed as cessation of life. Fred Feldman’s “Death and the Disintegration of Personality” challenges the idea that a person’s death implies a cessation of existence. In “Person and Corpse”, Eric Olsen explores, and finds wanting, the possibility that we continue to exist as an unconscious corpse after death, which brings up the ontological issue of what corpses are, and whether a corpse is identical to a living person prior to death.
The second theme is the relationship between death and time. Dean Zimmerman’s “Personal Identity and the Survival of Death” explores how personal survival will impact how one understands death and personhood by providing a profitable taxonomy according to which the implications of a criterion for the possibility of survival could depend on the acceptance of the doctrine of temporal parts. Theodore Sider’s “The Evil of Death: What Can Metaphysics Contribute?” is an ethical perspective on such a theme, showing how four-dimensionalism and presentism are compatible with the evilness of death. Lars Bergström’s “Death and Eternal Recurrence” is the only analytic take on a continental perspective on death and time, Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence or “eternal return” (the idea that everything that has happened will eternally happen again).
The third theme is a historical one, with a solitary take on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and an exorbitant amount of attention paid to the view of Epicurus. In “Death in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,” Gareth Matthews focuses on the “Socrates” represented in The Apology, Plato’s robust view of the immortality of the soul, and Aristotle’s ideas of the soul and immorality in The Nicomachean Ethics and De Anima. Phillip Mitsis, John Broome, Roy Sorensen, Christopher Belshaw, Kai Draper, all Steven Luper all providing variations on the Epicurean theme of whether death can harm us, whether it should be feared, what attitude it is rationally appropriate to have toward it, whether it is evil, or whether its badness can be retroactive.
We believe the historical theme of the handbook could have been greatly enhanced by confining the variations on the Epicurean theme to one or two contributions. This is not a criticism of the contributions themselves (they are all very well done), but an editorial critique of the restricted scope of the contributions. Where is an analysis of death from the existential perspective? Why cannot there be a substantial analytic contribution from the continental perspective? And if the handbook is going to focus on Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, why not touch upon Augustine, Pascal, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre or Camus? And why not include the poetic or literary perspectives of someone like Shakespeare, Coleridge or Tolstoy?
The fourth theme is death and immortality. Both “Immortality” by John Martin Fischer and “The Makropulos Case Revisited: Reflections on Immortality and Agency” by Connie Rosati provide rejoinders to the famous “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” by Bernard Williams. Williams launches a critique of immortality based on its undesirability and lack of value. Fischer finds both criticisms off the mark, and Rosati argues for the rationality of longing for immortality given that it is an expression of our autonomous agency.
At this point, the handbook circles back to a variation on the third theme, with Matthew Hanser’s “The Wrongness of Killing and The Badness of Death”, which considers the ethics of killing and its connection with why death is bad. Since killing violates the “special value or worth in virtue of which” persons “are owed respect”, the degree to which killing deprives persons of such a value is the degree to which such a person’s death is bad. The essay should have been positioned before Fischer’s.
The fifth, and final, theme is the relation of death to various issues in applied ethics: abortion, war, animal death, and capital punishment. Don Marquis’ “Abortion and Death” defends four theses: abortion causes the death of a fetus, the abortion of a non-sentient fetus causes death, abortion harms someone if it deprives one of valuable experiences, and harming a fetus presumptively does something wrong to the fetus. F.M. Kamm’s “The Morality of Killing in War: Some Traditional and Nontraditional Views” is an overview of the classic stances thinkers have taken on killing in war along with alternatives stances, with the caveat that such stances spring from nonconsequentialist ethics. Alastair Norcross’s “The Significance of Death for Animals” investigates the issue of whether death is bad for animals, where the degree of badness is in direct proportion to the quantity of well-being that is lost in a particular death. Torbjörn Tännsjö’s “Capital Punishment”is an incisive commentary on whether the killing of those who have themselves murdered other humans deserve killing themselves.
There is one obvious criticism of the present volume, mentioned at the beginning of the review. In one sense, we are not surprised at the lack of other disciplinary perspectives represented in the volume. The vast majority of the contributors are analytic philosophers. On the one hand, this is a strength of the volume, but the fact that it is an Oxford Handbook suggests that it would have a wider influence from other disciplinary perspectives. We have in mind explicit contributions from historians, literary scholars, scientists, and, especially, theologians. One easy way to remedy this problem would have been to publish it in a distinct series, but as it is published in the Handbook series one would expect a wider set of disciplines intended for a wider audience. Relatedly, the topics of a Handbook seem myopic. While there is an extensive discussion on death as cessation and important ethical applications of that discussion, one would expect a more comprehensive set of topics. Some of these might include various religious perspectives on death and how this fits into a broad encompassing systematic and practical theology.
In the end, this is the first sustained analytic treatment of death. It deserves the attention of philosophers and theologians, especially those sympathetic to the analytic tradition. Both religious philosophers and theologians will siphon out significant resources for additional constructive work on death and the afterlife. Apart from the criticism above concerning its mis-categorization as a Handbook, the present volume is an important contribution to the literature on death as a concept to be mined for wider use in analytic philosophy of religion and theology.
