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I think a discussion about what makes up life can easily and needlessly get bogged down in semantics.  Language is an artificial construct, and while it may be initially dismaying to think about in this way, the meaning of any given word is arbitrary.  Fortunately, we've all had many experiences with the word "life", and we agree on what is alive and what is not (at a remarkably high rate given the subjective nature of semantics.)  For the purposes of analyzing what life is, we have to work within the construct of what the generally accepted definition of "life" - the real puzzle being figuring out how to translate the shared ideal of the word to an acceptable written definition.