4th Global Conference
Wednesday 12th July - Friday 14th July 2006
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 2: The Dying Patient
Joint Session
Chair: Regis A. De Silva
The Dying Patient: A New Israeli Law
Asa
Kasher
Laura Schwarz-Kipp Professor of Professional Ethics and
Philosophy of Practice, Tel-Aviv University, and academic advisor, IDF
College of National Defense, Israel
No abstract is presently available
The Discovered Self: Catastrophic Illness,
Dying, and Death in the Shaping of Character
Marlene
Benjamin
Department of Politics,
Stonehill College,
North Easton, MA, USA
It is now common to hear people distinguish between “affective” and “intellectual” sorts
of knowledge. But it has taken philosophers rather longer to count anything
connected with affect as “knowledge.” Yet the difference
is important, and nicely articulated in Martha Nussbaum’s reading
that suffering is itself a kind of knowledge, not merely an instrument
for gaining the so-called “real knowledge” aimed at by the
rational reflections of philosophic thought. Further, she argues
that this sort of k nowledge is more closely represented in tragedy than
in traditional philosophic forms of inquiry precisely because “[I]nterpreting
a tragedy is a messier, less determinate, more mysterious matter than
assessing a philosophical example; and even when the work has once been
interpreted, it remains unexhausted, subject to reassessment, in a way
that the example does not. To invite such material into the center of
an ethical inquiry concerning . . . problems of practical reason is,
then, to add to its content a picture of reason’s procedures and
problems that could not readily be conveyed in some other form.”
In
fact, “[o]ur cognitive activity, as we explore the ethical
conception[s] embodied in the text[s of tragedy and in our daily lives],
centrally involves emotional response. We discover what we think about
. . . events partly by noticing how we feel.”
Nearly two decades
ago I began to think more self consciously about questions of character,
self, and the good life, but not in my usual way, or not only in my usual
way - using the narrowly defined language and principles of analytic
philosophy – but by working hard at
noticing how I feel, because Nussbaum is right: style is not neutral,
and the form of inquiry is not irrelevant to its content.
THE DISCOVERED
SELF is an attempt to demonstrate - by self-consciously exploring the
experience of witnessing the illness, dying and death of a loved one
- how a combination of the two sorts of knowledge, with their associated
methodologies, can, particularly in such cases of extremity, better inform
our understanding of the relationship between character formation and
the good human life.
The Evils of Making Sense of Death
Rob
Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Making sense of death is peculiar and hazardous task. The
death of a child or a person creates an emptiness of space
where something which should have been now will never be and ruptures,
fractures and evades attempts to make sense of what has happened.
It also drives a wedge between personal and professional life, in light
of which we need to recognise one vitally important thing. We need to
stick to the facts of what happened - to let evil be evil and death be
death. What what happens cannot be anything other than what it is - and
this thought betrays all quests for explanation. Explanations take us
away from the personal and particular nature of evil into the realm of
something more general. In the process they run the danger of becoming
immoral by justifying the evil they try to explain and alter the facts
of what has happened.
To love a child, a partner or a parent is to suffer when they are gone;
people suffer because they love, and because they are unwilling to surrender
or give up that love. What is important is that we should hear the silence,
allow it room to be, and in recognising its presence, stick to the facts
of what has happened.
Can the Dying Mourn?
Katherine
Powis
Department of Sociology,
University of Essex, United Kingdom
Seale (1998), in identifying the late modern patient-centred ‘scripts’ adopted
by the hospice movement, has declared that the dying themselves can now
play the role of chief mourner. Such scripts, he suggests, are predicated
on the construction of “dying and grief as orderly experiences,
guided by a knowing expertise” (1998, p.118); the “knowing
expert” in such cases being the sufferers themselves. For the aware
dying, it is proposed that some of their grief is anticipatory and the
manner in which they mourn their prospective death will offer guidance
and even hope to those who will have to negotiate their own bereavement
after the death of their loved one.
This paper will examine the psycho-analytic
roots of mourning theories to be found in Freud’s Mourning
and Melancholia (1917)
in order to determine how appropriate it might be to apply psychological
models of bereavement to the dying. While there can be no doubt loss
is a major feature in the experiences of the dying, meaning that elements
of such models may have relevance, I will propose that a key feature
of Freud’s foundational theory cannot be available to the aware
dying, thereby rendering the notion that the dying can ‘successfully’ mourn
untenable. I go on to suggest an alternative account of what may be intermingled
with the experiences of loss for the dying: the fear of annihilation.
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