There has been treatment of philosophical questions about death since at least Democritus, who lived from 460 to 370 B.C. However, the rise of analytic philosophy in the mid and late twentieth century in Britain and North America, and the accompanying disillusionment with metaphysical speculation, strongly tended to limit philosophical treatment of death to purely conceptual questions about the nature, continuity, and end of consciousness and related issues about personal identity. Despite the more-or-less canonical limits on treatments of death, more recently and especially in the past few years there has been an intriguing increase in British and North American philosophers’ interest in broader questions about death. Much of the renewed interest is due to the growing importance of work in applied ethics on end-of-life issues, but a number of the more recent books and journal articles go beyond those issues to look at fundamental questions about the nature of human life’s inevitable end.

More general intellectual interest in the large questions about death has tended and continues to be mainly literary, psychological, and sociological, but works in these areas have also shown a relatively new increase in variously focused considerations of death and how it is approached. The main impetus has been widespread discussion of end-of-life issues, especially assisted suicide and euthanasia: issues that have focused public and learned attention on death and dying.