Death

Philippe Huneman is Research Director at the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques at the Université Paris, France. He is also an affiliated professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, and he has published extensively on the philosophy of evolutionary biology and ecology.

“Those interested in the what, why, and the how of death will want to read Huneman’s excellent book. The critical discussions of the development of key historical theories, and the overviews of current work, make it especially valuable.” (Steven Luper, Metascience, Vol. 32 (3), 2023)

• Chapter 1. Introduction. Why a book about biological death in philosophy? What to find in it?.- Chapter 2. How Late 18th-Century Physiologists Understood the Living World and their task.- Chapter 3. Bichat’s theories and their genealogy.- Chapter 4. Physiology in Bichat’s Physiological Researches on Life and Death.- Chapter 5.  Bichat’s experimental physiology in the Recherches (part 2): death as an epistemic facilitator.- Chapter 6. Life and Death in Experimental Physiology after Bichat.- Chapter 7.  A providentialist metaphysics and the traditional economics of death : mortality and individuality.- Chapter 8. The evolutionary synthesis’ view of death: Peter Medawar, George C. Williams and the riddles of senescence.- Chapter 9 - Epistemology of death (1) : goals and evidences.- Chapter 10. Epistemology of death (2): experiments, tests and mechanisms.- Chapter 11. Ontology. The economics of death. and its trade-offs.- Chapter 12.  Ontology (2). Death programs and their discontents.- Chapter 13. Ontology (3). The case(s) for programs: Altruistic suicide, quasi-programs and smurfs.- Chapter 14. Death is a social issue.- Chapter 15. Conclusion.