Policy Press

Trouble with Death

Making Sense of Mortality in the Anthropocene

By Finn Bowring

This book combines Western history of death with sociology and philosophy to explore our approach to death. It examines sociological debates, the cultural construction of death and uses existential phenomenology and Freudian psychology to examine the search for meaning in our finite lives.

Finn Bowring is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University.

Introduction

1. Troubles with Death

2. Mortality and Tragedy in Greek Antiquity

3. Plato and the Immortality of the Soul

4. Death in the Second Millennium

5. Death Disavowed

6. The Disclosure of Death

7. Precarious Life

8. The Lives of Others