PHL382H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Lucretius, Ronald Dworkin, Epicurus
Document Summary
The conversations in the 70s and 80s surrounding death were prominent and dif cult. There were several legal cases in the us and canada at the time surrounding the ways in which we ought to consider people dead. The technology that is used to keep us alive has enlivened this question and conversation (viz. organ donation). Most people know think of dying as a process. This is even true physiologically: some parts of our bodies stay alive more than others. Indeed, that death is a process that unfolds over a period of time is uncontroversial. We can always divide the interval of time more nely ( zoom in ) to examine smaller segments of the process. For example, we can say that someone died of cancer, or we can zoom in and say that they died because their heart stopped; alternatively, we can zoom out and say they died because they smoked. Death is an event with hard-to-determine precision.
