Potentiality, Possibility, and the Irreversibility of Death
The Review of Metaphysics 62(1): 61-77
18 Pages Posted: 14 Aug 2013
Date Written: 2008
Abstract
One of the main tenets held to be essential to the definition of death is that it is irreversible. Understanding death as irreversible allows one to say that using resuscitative measures to revive a person whose life functions have temporarily ceased is not a case of bringing the dead back to life; rather, a temporary hiatus of one’s life functions does not entail that a person has died since this condition is reversible. The application of this tenet in clinical end-of-life cases is challenged, however, by the ability to maintain, through the use of a mechanical ventilator or a cardiopulmonary bypass machine, the vegetative functions of a body which has suffered whole-brain infarction and thus satisfies the widely accepted criterion for determining when death occurs. A whole-brain dead body, which has been declared irreversibly dead, does not seem dead if respiration and circulation persist through the medium of an external device. Is the machine, then, reversing the patient’s death? A further challenge is the prospect of cryopreserving the bodies of persons who have been declared dead, in the hope that future technological developments will allow such frozen bodies to be thawed, repaired, and thereby reanimated. These challenges prompt careful reflection of how death should be conceptually defined and clinically determined. This paper offers such reflection from the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical perspective. Aristotle and Aquinas understand a human person to be composed of a rational soul informing a living, sentient, animal body. What are the implications of this understanding in light of the above challenges? I have recently addressed the use of artificial technology to sustain a body’s vegetative functions, as well as the implications of the view I articulate with respect to cases of prolonged somatic survival after whole-brain death and the practice of non-heart-beating organ donation. In this paper, I will consider the case of cryopreservation. A central conceptual focus throughout this discussion is the purportedly irreversible nature of death and the criteria by which a human body is considered to be informed by a rational soul.
Keywords: Thomas Aquinas, soul, hylomorphism, personhood, death, potentiality
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