The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

Resuscitation technologies highlight new problematic aspects in terms of where the life-death boundary can be drawn referring to a human being, and not a cell, tissue or organ. There are clinical cases when it is challenging to unambiguously determine whether a patient on life support is still alive or already dead. In this regard, the term “moment of death” is regarded as debatable. The author also points out the reductionist nature of the neurological criterion of death, which tends to displace the cardiopulmonary criterion and provokes new moral dilemmas. In search of possible solutions to the outlined problems, the author compares two approaches to identifying the life-death boundary with reference a human being. On the one hand, there is the biomedical approach which can be described as a strictly scientific, mainly positivist one. On the other hand, there is a way of knowledge that goes beyond scientific rationality and appeals to the experience of divine revelation. If biomedical knowledge is characterized by operating with the physicalist dichotomy, Christian anthropology embraces mainly trichotomous views. Through bringing into correlation with Christian anthropology, the author questions the neuroreductionist position, characteristic of the biomedical approach, which identifies the death of a person with the death of one of her/his organs. An alternative to this approach might be a more holistic pneumatocentric view a human being, although the perspective of developing a new criterion of death, based on Christian ideas about human spirit, seems methodologically impossible within the existent biomedical paradigm. Nevertheless, in search of a holistic view that would take into account the biomedical context, it is possible to outline promising solutions when referring to the anthropological concept by Fr. Georgy Kochetkov. In particular, it is suggested to consider the end of human life as a spiritual event that takes place as act and process simultaneously in three dimensions — scientific, philosophical ontological and spiritual-existential.