Brain Death and the question of Personhood

The problematic-oriented enterprise of understanding man as a person, penetrating the central mystery into the being of man has always constituted an enigma plaguing thinking minds. Making adequate conceptions that are intellectually involving and exhaustively explanatory of human nature, as the case may be, more or less plunges us into deeper philosophical waters. The confrontation between the clinical and biological definitions of death in philosophical thought is the bedrock of this conflict regarding the nature of the human person. Issues emanating from this dwell on the status of personhood and the use of the so-called non-persons for medical knowledge and experimentation. However, this research is prompted by the ultimate need to establish a thesis that would take a position in defence of the status of personhood, without undermining the fact that the dignity of the human person is sacrosanct and cannot be overlooked in respective of the interpretation that may be given to the definition of death.