We have the pleasure to invite you to another open research seminar! This week John P. Lizza will give a talk: "Working Towards Consensus on Brain Death". The seminar will take place on Monday, 22nd of August, at 2:00 PM in the room 25 of Institute of Philosophy of Jagiellonian University and via MS Teams.

Abstract

“Oh yes, the human body is most definitely inhuman. Especially a dead one.” – Janina Duszejko

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

 

Disagreement over the acceptability of a neurological criterion for determining death (“brain death”) can sometimes be traced back to disagreement over biology, i.e., what it means for a human organism to be integrated as a whole. Disparate parties, such as James Bernat and D. Alan Shewmon, agree on defining death in biological terms as the irreversible loss of the integration of the organism as whole but disagree over whether the loss of all brain function is sufficient for determining that this state has occurred. In this paper, I argue that we need not resolve this biological disagreement in order to accept brain death as death. Instead, I suggest that we should put aside or bracket the disagreement in theoretical biology over what it means for an organism to be integrated as a whole and appeal to what I think are some very common moral and social considerations about what it means for one of us to die in order to arrive at a consensus that brain death is death.

 

This talk is jointy organized by Tomasz Żuradzki (as a part of the BIOUNCERTAINTY project) and Piotr Grzegorz Nowak as a part of his Sonata research grant (Grant No. 2020/39/D/HS1/02907). 

 

Link to the MS Teams meeting.