這篇論文回顧死亡學和社會學的雙軌發展，既針對死亡學在生物學、醫學與心理學基礎上，探求人類個體發展的自然律則；亦針對社會學移植自生物學的有機體觀點，並強調人類意識與生活經驗的社會建構過程等等，作為人類社會認識自己與自我詮釋的雙軌標的。而此雙軌發展隨著當代理論思潮分歧化而相互交織，藉由死亡或社會兩大概念彼此滲透，於是在死亡學領域開展出社會面向，也在社會學領域延伸出死亡的分析視域。本文的主要目的，一方面在釐清這兩大研究領域相互滲透的路徑；另一方面則藉自將個人死亡連接到社會死亡的層次， 提出生╱死建構理論的社會學參考架構。

　　　　　 This article aims to investigate the paralleled development of thanatology and sociology, which views the dynamic of human society firstly as a biological organism and then as a process of social construction of consciousness and experience, while thanatology explicates the natural law of the personal life circle in the aspect of physiology, medicine and psychology. These two disciplines interweave each other with the diversification of contemporary theoretic thoughts. They interpenetrate each other upon the category of death or society. This result in two consequences: thanatology can widen its social dimension, while sociology has set up the analytic horizon of death. There are two research purposes of this article: on the one hand, to make clear with which approaches interpenetrates thanatology into sociology and reversed; on the other hand, to submit a sociological framework to theoretic construction of life and death through an interrelation of personal death with social death which describes events of death as social events.