ABSTRACT
In “Dying Bodies and Dead Bodies: A Phenomenological Analysis of Dementia, Coma, and Brain Death,” Fredrik Svenaeus investigates how we should look upon the death of persons and their bodies, especially in cases in which they appear to split ways. The chapter makes use of the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas and other phenomenologists to argue that although life and death are to be understood on a bodily level, the ontological and ethical analyses of dying need to be complemented by a phenomenology of how persons may gradually disappear in power of being constituted by bodily processes that are breaking down. In this analysis, a continuous scale of different levels of personhood is introduced and compared to some influential views on the essence of human being and death in contemporary medicine and bioethics.
