The popularization of the term "clinical death" for the absence of vital signs suggests the possibility of a radical change in our understanding of death. While death used to be considered something that we do not have the power to reverse, contemporary optimism suggests that we may be able to restore life to a dead organism. In this article, I examine how the term "death" is used today to clarify what kind of irreversibility we ought to assign to it. I conclude that the kind of irreversibility closest to our concept of death is one that depends on implicit metaphysical commitments: we generally treat death as though it were metaphysically irreversible, and therefore not reversible by us.

中文翻译：

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死亡的形而上学不可逆性

由于缺乏生命体征，“临床死亡”一词的流行表明我们对死亡的理解有可能发生根本性的变化。虽然过去人们认为死亡是我们无法逆转的，但当代的乐观主义表明，我们或许能够让死去的有机体恢复生机。在这篇文章中，我研究了今天如何使用“死亡”这个词来阐明我们应该赋予它什么样的不可逆性。我的结论是，与我们的死亡概念最接近的那种不可逆性取决于隐含的形而上学承诺：我们通常将死亡视为形而上学上不可逆的，因此我们无法逆转。