Bernard N. Schumacher received his Ph.D. in philosophy and his Habilitation from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he currently teaches. He has also served as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Providence College, Rhode Island, and Lugano. He is the author of A Philosophy of Hope (2003) and has edited and co-edited numerous scholarly works, including L'humain et la personne (2008), Der Mensch und die Person (2008) and A Cosmopolitan Hermit: Modernity and Tradition in the Philosophy of Josef Pieper (2009).
Part I. Human Personal Death: 1. Introduction
2. Biological death
3. So-called 'personal death'
4. The anthropological challenge of neocortical death
5. Ethics as the criterion for defining death
6. Diversity of definitions of death in a secular ethic
7. Conclusion
Part II. Theory of Knowledge about Death: 8. Scheler's intuitive knowledge of mortality
9. Heidegger's being-towards-death
10. Is mortality the object of foreknowledge?
11. Inductive knowledge of death and Jean-Paul Sartre
12. Knowledge of mortality is inseparable from the relation to the other
13. Death as the object of experience
Part III. Does Death Mean Nothing to Us?: 14. The 'nothingness of death': Epicurus and his followers
15. Discussion of experientialism and the need for a subject
16. Death: an evil of privation
Conclusion.
