Deathis an inherentaspectof human life.We cantalk about itin terms ofphilosophical, cultural, religious, andmedical. However, thediscourseabout deathis difficult, carries asubjective viewand reference. The visionof dying anddeath,from a psychologicalpoint of view,dictatesthe conditions thatmust be complied within order totreat itsubjectively, not objectively.In practice, thepsychologicalimportantit becomesappropriate to prepareto relivethedeath oftheirloved ones.
The study analyses reports on the death of converts in the context of the period ideal of good dying. From the mid-16th century printed reports on the death of converts, which were conceived as public printed evidence that a member of a given denomination died a good death, confirmed his or her conversion and thus the authenticity and correctness of the given oracle. Doubts about the nature of the death of the converts appeared in the sources of a personal nature, too — in the Czech milieu they are found in some memes and journals from the period just after the battle of the White Mountain. Their analysis is aimed at revealing the attitudes of writers, often exiles, to the conversion and knowledge of ideas and values associated with the change of a denomination.
The debate over whether brain death is death has focused on whether individuals who have sustained total brain failure have satisfied the biological definition of death as “the irreversible loss of the integration of the organism as a whole.” In this paper, I argue that what it means for an organism to be integrated “as a whole” is undefined and vague in the views of those who attempt to define death as the irreversible loss of the integration of the organism as a whole. I show how what it means for a living thing to be integrated as a whole depends on the sortal (kind) concept by which it is identified. Since interests, values, and ontological considerations besides strictly biological ones affect the concepts by which we individuate and identify living things, those non-biological considerations have a bearing on what it means for a particular kind of living thing to exist as a whole and thus what it means for one of us to die. Even if our bodies may remain organically integrated in some sense despite total brain failure, this fact should not lead us to reject brain death as death. Artificially sustained brain-dead human bodies are not human beings, but the remains of them. While such bodies may be alive in some sense, they are not human beings or human persons. They are not one of us.
Illness is a phenomenon that goes beyond its purely medical dimension; its social and cultural aspects are noted more and more often. The turn to medical anthropology discussed in the article as well as contextual approach to communication viewed through culture demonstrate that illness is a phenomenon that should be talked about openly. The research referred to by the author shows that thanatological themes should not be avoided also in conversation with children. Thanks to an analysis of therapeutic tales structured by Woźny’s cultural script it has been possible to demonstrate that conversations about death lose their dramatic quality, if they are based on metaphor. A vivid, well-ordered presentation of dying in the form of a metaphor from a tale is one of the ways of teaching children the truth about death. Presenting dying in the form of a ritual is thus a ready-made pattern, i.e. a cultural script.
In this article, the author undertakes an attempt to examine the nature of death as such. He begins with analyzing the commonsense understanding of death and, then passes on to philosophical and theological analyses. The author attempts to refer the philosophical and theological reflection on death and dying to the contemporary cultural context. Without a proper answer to questions: who man is, why he came into existence, and what the purpose of his life is, one cannot overcame the fear of passing away, suffering and death.
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Alla luce della ragione la morte è un non senso, e violenza contro l’istinto primigenio d’ogni essere vivente, razionale o no, di amore e salvaguardia della propria vita e della propria corporeità. La rivelazione biblica getta sulla morte una luce di comprensibilità: evento originariamente naturale nel ciclo di perfezione della creatura e segno del suo limite creaturale, la morte si è caricata di paura e di violenza a causa del peccato, di cui è diventata la terribile punizione. La vittoria di Cristo sulla morte, con la risurrezione gloriosa del corpo, è la manifestazione concreta ed esplicita della sua vittoria sul male e sul peccato.
John Lizza says that to define death well, we must go beyond biological considerations. Death is the absence of life in an entity that was once alive. Biology is the study of life. Therefore, the definition of death should not involve non-biological concerns.
Tanatopedagogics as a study on upbringing with the awareness of mortality, imprinted in the nature of human being based on a fundamental principle of respect for the dignity of every human being and the integrity and a priori value of human life draws on the ideas of Viktor Frankl.
In this paper, I argue that God never intends a human being’s death. The core argument is essentially Thomistic. God wills only the good; and human life is always a good, and its privation always an evil. Thus, St. Thomas holds that “God does not will death as per se intended,” and he gives an account of the act of divine punishment that conforms to this claim. However, some further claims of St. Thomas are in tension with this position – particularly his claims as regards the permissibility of intentional killing by agents of the state. I argue that alternative conclusions on these matters are in fact more harmonious with St. Thomas’s claims about God and God’s willing than are his own.
Passing, departing of man became an awkward subject in the contemporary civilization (avoiding problems of old age and death, the cult of the body). However, the problem of solitude affect's man at every time of his or her life. Therefore, there is a need to seek solutions in the interdisciplinary dimension conducive to the elimination of loneliness of older people (or at least to contribute to their reduction) and relieve the consequences. Active participation of older people in the life of family and society is very important. People supporting the elderly (physicians, nurses, social workers, volunteers) should promote the concept of old age being valuable, full of possibilities, often hidden developmental reserves.
The article focuses on roadside memorials (RSMs) created for the victims of traffic accidents in the Czech Republic. It provides the results of longitudinal field research conducted in central and northern Bohemia in the periods 2005-2008 (first research wave) and 2011-2014 (second research wave). Attention is devoted particularly to the temporality of such memorials. The research, consisting of the study of a sample of 69 roadside memorials, was repeated after a period of around seven years and the data from both waves sebsequently compared; the final sample consisted of 89 memorials.
The article reviews the book Śmierć, nieśmiertelność, sens życia. Egzystencjalny wymiar filozofii Ludwiga Wittgensteina [Death, Immortality, the Meaning of Life: The Existential Dimension of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophy], by Ireneusz Ziemiński.
The article reviews the book Śmierć, nieśmiertelność, sens życia. Egzystencjalny wymiar filozofii Ludwiga Wittgensteina [Death, Immortality, the Meaning of Life: The Existential Dimension of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophy], by Ireneusz Ziemiński
The text emphasizes the difference between two artistic approaches. The first one of them is rare and comprises various kinds of artistic games with death undertaken by the artists, whereas the second one depends on playing with the subject of death, where death plays the part of an „embellishment” or some kind of attraction, which should draw the attention of the viewer. The text concentrates on such artistic realizations, in which the first of the mentioned approaches is visible. The selected „games with death” in the works by, among others, K. Kozyra, A. Szapocznikow, R. Opałka and Ch. Boltanski, are analysed. The analyses make use of theoretical works by, among others, H.G. Gadamer, P. Ariès, H. Belting, R. Barthes and G. Steiner.
One of the many research passions of Magdalena Sokołowska, regarded as the founder of Polish and cofounder of European medical sociology, was sociothanatological problems in the broad sense. Magdalena Sokołowska’s version of “socio-thanatology” presented at the end of the nineteen-seventies and the early eighties consisted first of all in sociodemographic considerations. The deontological and ethical-moral problems, as well as individual existential experiences associated with the process of dying, being disregarded during the period in question, appeared in M. Sokołowska’s research conceptions and papers in the nineteen-eighties. She was particularly concerned with the patterns of dying in medical institutions, conceptions of dying trajectories, processes of “waiting for death”, mechanisms of the institutionalization, commercialization and medicalization of dying, differences between the conditions and context of dying at home and in the hospital, consequences of “slow dying” for the range of social roles performed by the doctor and the nurse, the scope and character of changes in the function and structure of the family in the course of the process of dying and as a result of the death of one of its members, analysis of social behaviors after death in the institutional and noninstitutional context (hospital, hospice, home), etc. The analysis of Magdalena Sokołowska’s “socio-thanatological” achievements allows us to notice a clear evolution of her conception: from the “epidemiological-demographic” approach, oriented towards analysis of mortality, to a preference for “qualitative” interpretations based on the investigation of “subjective emotions” that accompany dying persons.
Feature of oeuvre of Marina Tsvetaeva – the predominance of the motive of death. Henry Gorchakov discovers this topic in sixty percent of the poet’s works of M.Tsvetaeva. Naturally, reflections on death are accompanied by reflections on life. The article analyzes the peculiarities of development of Tsvetaeva’s work of another constant motive – the motive of life, the concept of which is found out in a complex metaphysical context of thinking. Particular attention is paid to the diversity of approaches to understanding life and their changes. At the same time, the poet does not develop his own philosophy of life, focusing on the world of experiences, on the one hand, or on a holistic and volatile reality, on the other.
Categories of action, lack of action and release of death are the subject of lively discussion especially in the circle of analytic philosophy. Philosophical analysis in this article focuses essentially on the principle of symmetry and neo-Thomistic moral principles voluntarium indirectum because they play an important role in resolving the issue of moral dilemmas, or situations associated with a diffi cult choice between alternative options. The distinction between these three categories is crucial in matters related to the prolongation of human life and the release of death. Competing concepts, illustrating the analysis of the category of action, lack of action and the release of death, refer to the ideas of such thinkers as M. Tooley, D. Callahan, Ph. Foot, B. Williams, F.M. Kamm, B. Chyrowicz.
Taking the cue from some verses of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien, where the poet talks about the distinction between life and death, a distinction which mortals perform too rigidly, in this paper I discuss the contrast just between life and death, in order to understand the conditions under which the first truly distinguishes itself from the latter. This happens to the extent that life is also distinguished from the denial of death because otherwise, being the negation a form of necation (nex = killing, murder), the presumed denial of death would reverse in a triumph of death. In the present age this circumstance is particularly evident and significant, since humanity aims at a technological realization of im‑mortality, understood as the denial of death. To the extent that this remains a negative operation, it takes the form of the scrapping of mortals. True liberation/salvation from death presupposes that the negation itself is called into question. Only on this condition, in fact, is possible a life free from any form of necation. This freedom presupposes, inter alia, a “non” education, intended as an education to be able to freely play with the negative of death and denial.
The author’s intention is to present the most important techniques applied by Słowacki intended to evoke a negative projection of death in three dramas written in the pre-mystic period: Kordian, Balladyna and Beatryks Cenci. The excerpted material is analysed semantically and lexically in view of its semantic contexts concerning human death. The basis of the reconstruction of the negative creation of mors, featured in these works, is provided by a description and discussion of the figures of speech and rhetorical devices with a lexical component that belongs to the semantic field ‘death’ (metaphors and personifications in particular), as well as substitute designations for designates that are related to the phenomenon of the passing of time where one’s life is slowly coming to an end. In addition, the author provides a characteristics of the Thanatic semantics of the lexeme blood and derivatives thereof, as well as names for the colour red. Verbal realizations of such conceptual constructions highlight such features of deaths as: mysteriousness, ghastliness, rapaciousness, perversity, brutality and cruelty that imply the feeling of sadness, fear and repulsion. It should be noted, however, that the “theater of death”, presented by Słowacki in the dramas, is of ambivalent nature because the negative manifestations of Thanatos are at the same time supplemented with euphemistic approaches aimed at easing the tension, softening the horror of death and camouflaging its terrifying dimension. These approaches are discussed in the following article: Juliusza Słowackiego “theatrum mortis” na przykładzie “Kordiana”, “Balladyny” i “Beatryks Cenci” – wizja ułagodzona.
The article focuses on a change in the understanding of death. Transhumanism is here understood as a reaction to the technicization of culture. One of the areas which are declared to be transcended by technology is human mortality. Analysis of such a change is conducted to show that one does not need a working technology that abolishes death, but that the change could be cultural and have significant impact on human life. This process of transcending death with the usage of technology is understood as a fictionalization of death. The philosophical and cultural outcomes are analyzed for human existence.
This study is devoted to the biblical background of the article of faith „He Descended into Hell”, which is the least known and the least understood by modern Christians. The truth about the descensus of the Son of Man is deeply rooted in the religious thought of Israel, which is shown by inspired and non-canonical texts. According to the views of the ancient, the death and the abyss constituted the necessary elements of the human existence. Christ, surrendering to the law of death, descended into Sheol after His death. In the underworld, being sinless, He conquered evil and its maker. He brought the good news to the dead, who had been waiting for the Messiah for centuries. The Work of Redemption by the Son of God is universal.
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