Reexamining the Definition of Death and Becoming Clearer about What It is to be Alive

Abstract

The papers by Martin Pernick and Roland Puccetti are more complimentary than may at first be apparent. Pernick portrays the interplay, through time, of four major clusters of questions regarding death. In the process, his paper provides a history that leads to the issues examined by Roland Puccetti. These four clusters of questions are: (1) What does it mean to be alive? (2) What does it mean to be embodied? (3) What tests will provide us with an acceptably low number of false-positive tests for being dead? and (4) How does one choose a point of death along a continuum from being alive to having died? These questions in turn depend for their answers on the meaning of being alive. Human life has variously been interpreted as equivalent to: (a) the presence of a soul as an animating and rational entity, (b) the presence of a soul as a vital principle, (c) life as biological integration, and (d) life as the presence of a person.