L'uso del concetto di Personal Identity Over Time nella valutazione delle questioni di fine vita

The purpose of my thesis is to show how we can use the philosophical concept of numerical identity to analyze and provide good arguments about the so called ‘end of life’ issues. In the last decades, both medical and biological research have made progresses that force us to face difficult ethical situations. The case I’m interested in is the one of human death: when we can declare someone dead? When his heart is not beating anymore, or rather when is brain cannot perform his ntegrative functions? According to current laws and protocols, death occurs when the entire brain is irreversibly damaged. However, some important objections have been raised: why should we consider the entire brain, and not only those areas associated with consciousness? In my thesis, I have tried to answer these questions from a different starting point. I didn’t properly work on ‘death’, instead I worked on the concept of ‘continuity of life’ and ‘persistence’: if it were possible to find a criterion of our identity over time, then it would also be possible to say when our death occurs. After an introduction on the concept of numerical identity through time and its ties with ethics, I offered a reconstruction of three main ways to deal with this metaphysical issue. In the first chapter, I focused on the so called psychological approach. In the second chapter, I tried to present the biological approach as it is developed in Eric Olson’s writings. Finally, I briefly introduced Lynne Rudder Baker’s theory about constitution and showed why, according to my analysis, the ‘whole brain criterion’ fails to result as strong as it should to be assumed as a valid death criterion, trying to argue in favour of the so called ‘high- brain criterion’.