

One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. Additionally, the advent of life-sustaining therapy and the numerous criteria for defining death from both a medical and legal standpoint, have made it difficult to create a single unifying definition. There are many scientific approaches and various interpretations of the concept. The concept of death is a key to human understanding of the phenomenon. French – 16th-/17th-century ivory pendant, Monk and Death, recalling mortality and the certainty of death ( Walters Art Museum)
