Death and Finitude

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This book offers an examination and defense of what I call a pragmatic transcendental anthropology applicable to the concepts of limit, finitude, and mortality that are constitutive of human life as we know it. Thus, the book will develop a special kind of philosophical anthropology (a pragmatic yet transcendental examination of the human condition), interpreting what is worth preserving in the tradition of transcendental philosophy in such a manner that this unusual combination will crucially enrich our understanding of a human problem we all share mortality. It is a general background idea of this discussion that philosophy should be humanly relevant. This belief reflects the author s metaphilosophical pragmatism. There is a sense in which serious philosophy inevitably reflects on the human condition and is thus philosophical anthropology, broadly conceived. Furthermore, there can hardly be any more serious problem concerning the human condition than the problem of death. Yet, upon reading mainstream analytic contributions to the philosophy of death metaphysical as well as ethical, focusing on, say, the definition and criteria of death or various issues in applied ethics related to dying and killing one may experience a certain kind of frustration. That kind of philosophical literature usually addresses death in general, and it is far from obvious that it is philosophically relevant in the sense of addressing the agony of an individual human being trying to understand their own mortal condition. On the other hand, Continental philosophy of death may be frustrating in a different sense, as it often fails to be conceptually as clear and argumentatively as rigorous as the analytic literature. Claiming to address my being-toward-death, such contributions may also fail to speak to the mortal individual as they end up in endless pseudo-philosophical jargon. It is against this background of frustration that the present book is offered as a contribution to humanity s on-going reflections on death, dying, and mortality from a pragmatist yet transcendental perspective, seeking to accommodate these topics within a broader philosophical anthropology. The book is primarily intended for academic philosophers, but the potential readership could include not only scholars but also both graduate students and advanced undergraduates, as well as general educated readers. The book ought to be interesting from the point of view of people with quite different philosophical backgrounds. It is intended to be relevant to the concerns of philosophers specializing in, for example, transcendental philosophy, philosophical anthropology, pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of religion. As the book may be said to be an attempt to philosophize historically, it is in principle of interest to both systematically and historically oriented philosophers and students.