Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy by Bernard N. Schumacher (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 158 (302), “summary” for “recapitulation” (457). Greek words are often improperly transliterated. “Inclusive language” (actually excluding women from mankind) produces imprecision: human persons, humans, human beings, people, human nature, humanity, humankind, etc., almost invariably replace “man” and “men”; “man” is not the same as “human person.” Likewise Trinitarian treatises turn on the relation between person and nature. The translators change “God, Father of Men” into “God, Father of All” (83), despite Ladaria’s nuanced position: divine fatherhood applies primarily to Jesus Christ and thereafter to disciples by adoption in Christ, although in view of Matthew 5:45-48 God can be said to “behave with an attitude of love (and hence, in a certain sense, of Fatherhood) with respect to all people [hombres]” (83-85, 128-29, 415-16). More than a manual, Ladaria’s study is almost too rich for beginners; teachers must select and explain the central sections, letting students deepen their knowledge by later returns to the text. Ladaria has made a major contribution to Trinitarian theology and, to my knowledge, offers the best presentation of the Trinitarian mystery in modern theology. He summarizes the Church’s teaching and attempts a new synthesis that must be taken seriously by theologians. (Anyone desiring a list of errata can request it at mcdermott.john@shms.edu.) JOHN M. MCDERMOTT, S.J. Sacred Heart Major Seminary Detroit, Michigan Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy. By BERNARDN.SCHUMACHER. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 258. $27.99 (paper). ISBN 978-0-521-17119-9. Death is certainly not just a theoretical problem, but an existential one. Even animals flee death, but our human life begins with a reflective relation to death: one of the first indicators of hominization is burial rituals. Concern for the afterlife can be found wherever human beings are, and philosophy has made it one of its fundamental topics as well. Questions of the immortality of the soul (e.g., Plato) or the very reality of death (e.g., Epicurus) have been philosophical themes from the beginning. Nevertheless, the last century has witnessed a whole new range of questions and discussions on this topic—and this in spite of the fact that it has become less conspicuous in the public sphere. For example, the turn of modern thought to epistemology as a “first science” can also be found in the question, how we can even know death at all, that is, how can it become a phenomenon for us? Indeed, we are the animal that knows that it has to die, but how exactly do we know that? The contemporary discussion on the bioethical criteria for death (e.g., brain death or heart death) and related questions (is every BOOK REVIEWS 159 human being a person?) are likewise new developments. The question whether death is good, evil, or indifferent has been taken on in refined ways by analytical philosophers. Hence it was about time for a comprehensive survey of all these new conversations, which are sometimes unaware of each other. This is what B. Schumacher (University of Fribourg, in Switzerland) has thankfully undertaken in his book Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy. With great erudition, covering a vast array of bioethical, philosophical, and literary material, he presents several conversations, under three broad headlines: (1) bioethical definitions of death, (2) the epistemological puzzles of how we know death, and (3) the reality of death: is it nothing; is it good, evil, or indifferent? The first part of the book opens up the significance of the question from the bioethical perspective. A recent change in the medical definition of death is at least indirectly related to the philosophical question of death: in 1968 Harvard’s medical school proposed to replace the traditional criterion of death as the irreversible cessation of spontaneous heartbeat and respiration with the criterion of brain death. The motivation was pragmatic: declaring someone dead before the cessation of the heartbeat saves the money of continued treatment, and it allows harvesting organs while they are still viable (17f.). (Paradoxically, the new definition yields its results only because potential donors are “kept alive” for the harvest of the organs.) Such functional definitions also seem...