Death is inevitable. It is a taboo subject and also the subject of nightly broadcasts on television whether as fiction or as news. That we die is a major factor in what makes us human. How we face death - our own, those of loved one's, those of strangers, those of enemies - defines the meaning and purpose we give to life and our relations to others and the natural world about. For Hegel it is the fear of death, the desire to survive that leads a given subject to submit to the master and adopt the position of slave. This decision to live is for Hegel the foundation of culture, knowledge, skill. It is through addressing the desires of the master that the slave must learn how to transform the raw material of the world about to meet those desires. For Lacan, Death is the Absolute Master. In Boothby's interpretation of this, change is experienced as death by a fragile ego. The new, the creative can only come into being through the death of the old. For poststructuralists such as Barthes, the 'death of the author' (as source, as master of the meaning of a text) was a way of liberating the text from moribund traditions in literary theory and opening it to multiple interpretations. Such views contributed to the development of methodologies built around intertextuality/de- construction (Kristeva, Derrida). For Lyotard, the condition of knowledge in the postmodern world was that of a skepticism towards master narratives. Post WW2 the totalitarian tendencies of master narratives, their terrorizing effects (Deleuze and Guattari) were implicated in all the hideous acts of concentration camps, mass death through bombing, environmental disasters and the construction of mass poverty. Is there a possibility of humanizing, being less sure of the status of knowledge that might lead to a more modest approach to people and the world? For Levinas, it is by recognising the suffering of the other, the other's vulnerability that the possibility of an ethical relationship can arise. Death then is a powerful theme for philosophy, the development of methodologies to conduct research, and for ethics. This paper will explore the implications that can be drawn from philosophical debates for constructing educational approaches to death in the lives of individuals (whether as children, adults or as those who face their own death through illness etc). It will draw not only upon philosophical approaches to the study of cultural and individual experience but will also draw upon the research data that the authors have collected across a number of projects in school, community and health contexts. What are the implications for professional practice and learning?