[The subject of death. On the current controversy about brain-oriented determination of death].

Abstract

Recently new concepts of partial brain death have seriously challenged the well-established whole-brain definition of death. In the present paper, we propose a 4-level-model of death, which differentiates the levels of attribution, definition, criteria, and tests. It is argued that whole-brain concepts of death are susceptible to partial-brain oriented criticism, mainly because they do not provide a precise determination of the subject of death.