Associate Professor Michael Nair-Collins, Ph.D., is the author of A Theory of Death, an upcoming book that seeks to understand death as a natural biological phenomenon.

Nair-Collins argues that the natural world exists independently of our social practices, language, and human conventions, and that death is not a social construction or choice. He develops a theory of life on Earth as a dynamic, thermodynamic, chemical, and physiological system embedded in an ancient evolutionary context, and explains death as the event when entropy overwhelms homeostasis. The book engages with broader philosophical ideas about truth and reality, how words and concepts are related to the world, and how we can come to know about the natural world.

A Theory of Death will be of interest to bioethicists, clinicians, philosophers of science and biology, biomedical scientists, and anyone with an interest in death as a natural biological phenomenon.