Death has long been a pre-occupation of philosophers, and this is especially so today. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death collects 21 newly commissioned essays that cover current philosophical thinking of death-related topics across the entire range of the discipline. These include metaphysical topics--such as the nature of death, the possibility of an afterlife, the nature of persons, and how our thinking about time affects what we think about death--as well as axiological topics, such as whether death is bad for its victim, what makes it bad to die, what attitude it is fitting to take towards death, the possibility of posthumous harm, and the desirability of immortality. The contributors also explore the views of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato and Epicurus on topics related to the philosophy of death, and questions in normative ethics, such as what makes killing wrong when it is wrong, and whether it is wrong to kill fetuses, non-human animals, combatants in war, and convicted murderers.

With chapters written by a wide range of experts in metaphysics, ethics, and conceptual analysis, and designed to give the reader a comprehensive view of recent developments in the philosophical study of death, this Handbook will appeal to a broad audience in philosophy, particularly in ethics and metaphysics.

CONTENTS:

Introduction: The Philosophy of Death
Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, Jens Johansson
1. When Do Things Die?
Cody Gilmore
2. Death and the Disintegration of Personality
Fred Feldman
3. The Person and the Corpse
Eric Olson
4. Personal Identity and the Survival of Death
Dean Zimmerman
5. The Evil of Death: What Can Metaphysics Contribute?
Theodore Sider
6. Death and Eternal Recurrence
Lars Bergström
7. Death in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
Gareth B. Matthews
8. When Death Is There, We Are Not: Epicurus on Pleasure and Death
Phillip Mitsis
9. The Badness of Death and the Goodness of Life
John Broome
10. The Symmetry Problem
Roy Sorensen
11. The Timing Problem
Jens Johansson
12. Death, Value, and Desire
Christopher Belshaw
13.Death and Rational Emotion
Kai Draper
14. Retroactive Harms and Wrongs
Steven Luper
15. Immortality
John Martin Fischer
16. The Makropulos Case Revisited: Reflections on Immortality and Agency
Connie Rosati
17. The Wrongness of Killing and the Badness of Death
Matthew Hanser
18. Abortion and Death
Don Marquis
19. The Morality of Killing in War
Frances Kamm
20. The Significance of Death for Animals
Alastair Norcross
21. Capital Punishment
Torbjörn Tännsjö
Index

AUTHORS:

Ben Bradley is Allan and Anita Sutton Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University.

Fred Feldman is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Jens Johannson is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala Universitet.