The Cambridge Companion to Life and Death

This volume covers a wide range of themes about the metaphysics of life and death, the significance of life and death and the ethics of life and death, all of which are interrelated. At a biological level, it is suggested that the Programme-Metabolism-Container model explains the characteristic phenomena of life and this leads on to a consideration of the nature of people and personal identity - the brain as opposed to 'animalism'. Our physical identity is constituted as people persisting in time and space, while the nature of death is debated in terms of brain and circulatory respiratory models. The second part considers the nature of the good life, bringing in the Stoic view that virtue is a component of happiness and discussing whether our non-existence prior to life is equivalent that after life (a materialist perspective is maintained throughout). Life's meaning in relation to purpose and identity is set within a model of 'achievementism' (a new term for me). The last part is devoted to the ethics of life and death, discussing enhancement, procreation, abortion, suicide, killing in self-defence, euthanasia, and the killing of animals. The book is more suitable for study purposes but is certainly written at a level accessible to the general reader.