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Record W1779136335 · doi:10.1093/analys/anq101

The Philosophy of Death * By STEVEN LUPER

2010· article· en· W1779136335 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueAnalysis · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicNeuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Calgary
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEssentialismSubject (documents)HarmJudgementMetaphysicsPhilosophyEpistemologySlippery slopeLawSociologyPolitical scienceComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This is the most rigorously argued book on death since Jeff McMahan's The Ethics of Killing (2002). Luper's exhaustive analysis is impressively comprehensive, covering the full range of metaphysical and ethical dimensions of death. Like that of other philosophers writing on this topic, Luper's discussion is motivated by three questions associated with Epicurus: Can we identify a subject who is harmed by death? In what sense can a person be harmed by the state of being dead? At what time does the harm occur? For Epicurus, death cannot harm the person who dies because ‘when death is, then we are not’. There is no subject who exists after death. So there is no one with interests the thwarting of which could harm one after death. And there is no time following the event of death when one could be harmed. The book is divided into two general parts consisting of 9 chapters. The first part is primarily a discussion of Epicurus's three questions, while the second part discusses three types of killing: suicide; euthanasia; and abortion. Laying out a theoretical framework within which to address these issues, in Chapters 1 and 2 Luper analyses different accounts of life and the kinds of beings we are. He asserts that something is alive only if it has a substantial capacity to maintain itself. After considering animal essentialism, mind essentialism and person essentialism, he claims that each of these accounts leads to counterintuitive consequences and that we should withhold judgement on this ontological question. In Chapter 3, Luper offers some intriguing alternatives to the standard view that death is the permanent cessation of all brain functions. These include ‘threshold death’, which occurs when the dying process reaches the point of irreversibility, ‘integration death’, which occurs when an organism's physiological systems can no longer function as an integrated whole, and ‘denouement death’, which occurs when the dying process completes itself. He also explores the conceivability of restoring the body's atoms after decomposition, in which case death need not be permanent.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.047
Threshold uncertainty score0.396

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.044
GPT teacher head0.322
Teacher spread0.278 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it