2025.01.13 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
J. Jeremy Wisnewski, Living with the Dead: On Death, the Dead, and Immortality, Routledge, 2023, 264pp., $54.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781032293868.
Reviewed by John Martin Fischer, University of California, Riverside
In Living with the Dead, J. Jeremy Wisnewski explains how we do in fact live with the dead in many ways. As he puts it, “our lives are saturated by their past intentions and values. To live just is to live with the dead” (5). He contends that we have many (defeasible) obligations to the dead, including those that arise from deathbed promises and in “burial rites, medical and forensic science, wills and endowments, commemorative ceremonies, and historical study” (13). Wisnewski explores the nuanced philosophical terrain with subtlety, insight, and good judgment.
He argues that we live with the dead in another important way: “we offer them (and ourselves) a form of modest immortality by fulfilling our obligations to remember them—the dead can ‘live on’ in…
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