PHIL-360 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Suspended Animation, If And Only If, Brain Death
27 Oct 2016
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The gift of life [56] we need to use life in our definition of death, but because the analysis of life in chapters 2 and 3 was inconclusive, we"ll have just to treat it as an unanalyzed primitive. Recap of points in chapter 1: according to the biological concept, dying is the same for jfk, dodos and trees. That is, it cannot be defined in terms unique to humans (like brain waves) because trees die and they don"t have brains. Also: criterion of death vs. analysis (see p. 17): Sample criterion of death: cod: x dies at t iff x"s brain ceases to emit z-waves. Sample analysis of death: d1: x dies at t =df. x ceases to be alive at t. A single counterexample shows that the analysis is incorrect (shows the failure of analyticity, like the. Martian did for the vitalist analysis of life in chapter 3).
