Capacity for Suicide and its Consequences for the Conception of Human Nature

Name: Daniel Janoško Title: Capacity for Suicide and its Consequences for the Conception of Human Nature Abstract The aim of the thesis is, first, to analyze the ability to deliberately end one's own life, which, assuming its human exclusivity within the animal kingdom as well as its universality within the human species, should provide a rich source for revealing some already known and some potentially entirely novel aspects of human nature and condition. The capacity for suicide is therefore analysed not from the dominating position of moral philosophy, but rather from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. Based on both the philosophical (Scheler, Heidegger, Landsberg, Jaspers, etc.) and empirical anthropological literature, we attempt to answer the question of human exclusivity of the capacity for suicide. The intention of this analysis is, then, to find the essential aspects of this exclusivity from which practical consequences can be drawn for further philosophical conceptualizations of human nature. The most crucial of these appears to be the awareness of one's finality. A detailed examination of such awareness then reveals other aspects of human nature and condition, such as the specifically human communal way of living, the human's effort to endure, both materially and spiritually, in the..