Philippe Huneman - Death: Perspectives from the Philosophy of Biology

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They say that no man is an island; I dont know geography enough to assess this claim, but I know for sure that no book is an island. This one has been nurtured, nourished and fueled by many books and papers, but above all, by many discussions with amazing scholars whose knowledge hopefully percolated within these pages.

I am therefore grateful to:

Friends who read the manuscript and helped me with their precious comments and suggestions, without which the result would not be of any interest: Christophe Bouton, Eric Bapteste, Christopher Donohue, Sbastien Dutreuil, Philippe Jarne, Alice Lebreton Mansuy, Tim Lewens, Charles Wolfe.

Biologists who were generous enough to let me share some of their innovative work on death and senescence: Eric Bapteste, Michael Rera, Pierre Durand.

And the many philosophers and biologists with whom, by discussing over the years, I have been able to understand slightly better than I used to do the enigmas of life and deathamong them, and even though they are too numerous to be all mentioned here, let me name Andr Ariew, Denis Walsh, Mark Bedau, Frdric Bouchard, Thomas Reydon, Hugh Desmond, Robert Richards, Phillip Sloan, Robert Brandon, Virginie Maris, Sonia Kfi, Annick Lesne, Alex Rosenberg, Anya Plutynski, Francesca Merlin, Claude Romano, Franois Munoz, Andy Gardner, Minus van Baalen, Rgis Ferrire, Silvia De Monte, Charles Wolfe, Laura Nuno de la Rosa Garcia, Johannes Martens, Antonine Nicoglou, Arnaud Pocheville, Guillaume Lecointre, Thomas Heams, Marshall Abrams, Grant Ramsey, Manuel Blouin, Isabelle Drouet, Michel Veuille, Pierre-Henri Gouyon, Marion Vorms, Thomas Pradeu, Ariel Lindner, Etienne Danchin, Camille Nos, and all the others, including the master and grad students who provided me with invaluable and fruitful discussions along the years.

And I am not grateful to the current neoliberal research policy that pervades the whole academic world; all of us, we can think and work only against it, and in spite of its existence.

The first section of the book has been partly translated from a French text by Anita Conrade. I am very grateful to her invaluable work. It was partly based on a book I published in 1998, entitled Bichat: la vie et la mort (Paris: Puf). Anita Conrade also language checked half of the rest of the book, as did Hugh Desmond; I was also helped regarding language issues by Charles Wolfe and Denis Walsh; Im most grateful to all of them.

The grant ANR-DFG Gendar Generalized Darwinism covered expenses related to some work done in this book.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my two masters, Grard Lebrun and Jean Gayon. I hope that I managed in my work to grasp some reflections of their philosophical flame, and slightly pursue their philosophical pathways.