Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 2: The Dying Patient
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.