Aging in an Aging Society - Critical Reflections - Iva Apostolova
3. Aging and the Loss of Social Presence
Aging in an Aging Society - Critical Reflections - Iva Apostolova
Christine Overall [+]
Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario
Christine Overall is a Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, where she holds a University Research Chair. Her main areas of research and publication are feminist philosophy and applied ethics. Her book, Aging, Death, and Human Longevity: A Philosophical Inquiry (University of California Press, 2003) won the Canadian Philosophical Association's 2005 book prize and the Royal Society of Canada’s Abbyann D. Lynch Medal in Bioethics in 2006. Her most recent books are Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate (MIT Press, 2012), and the edited volume, Pets and People: The Ethics of Our Relationships with Companion Animals (Oxford, 2017).
Description
“Aging and the Loss of Social Presence” by Christine Overall aims at exposing the worrying tendency of enforced loss of social presence of old(er) persons. To the suggestion touted by some philosophers that there are benefits for the individual from withdrawing from professional and social life in old age, Overall counter-proposes a re-examination of the way the individual herself values her own aging and dying process.