Immortality

Edited by K. Mitch Hodge (Masaryk University, Queen's University, Belfast)
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Summary

Although immortality literally means “not mortal,” its more specific and commonly used meaning refers to a conscious entity, or a part of that conscious entity, not being subject to non-existence by death and eternally existing, in whole or in part, once it exists.  Some immortal entities, such as God or gods, are believed to have always existed and are not subject to death.  All known animals, including humans, however, are mortal—meaning, in the least, their physical body dies.  Numerous philosophies and theologies, however, maintain that the death of the body does not entail the nonexistence of conscious entity, in whole or in part.  If the part of the conscious entity (e.g., life force, energy, or atoms) that continues to exist does not also confer and maintain personal identity then such immortality is said to be metaphysically thin.  If, however, the conscious entity maintains its personal identity such immortality is said to metaphysically thick.  In philosophy of religion, it is the latter that has received the lion’s share of attention: specifically how it can be conceived that an individual (human) person can continue to exist beyond the death of the physical body in such a way that she not only retains personhood but also her unique identity.

Several options from various philosophical and religious traditions have been offered as to how a human individual can survive her own death; these include reincarnation, resurrection (of the body), disembodied soul, and ethereal (astral) body.  Reincarnation, also known as transmigration of the soul, has the longest philosophical legacy, and was the type of immortality favored since at least the time of Pythagoras, and accepted by Socrates (through his mouthpiece, Plato).  In this tradition, some type of identity conferring essence (e.g., soul) of the person is said to continue to exist after death and be reborn into another mortal body (with some exceptions) in perpetuity.  Resurrection of the body is the official doctrine of Christianity.  This doctrine states that once an individual dies (immediately or at some future time) God will resurrect (and perfect) the individual in his entirety.  This resurrected individual (including the body) will never die again, and thus is immortal.  The idea of humans continuing to exist after the death of the physical body as a disembodied soul has been discussed in philosophy since at least the time of Plato, but the ideas major exegesis did not come until Descartes.  Descartes argued that he was “a thing that thinks” (i.e., a thinking thing, a mind) and that this thing was his soul.  This soul was an immaterial substance and immortal and separated from the physical body at the time of death.  Whether or not the soul was ever again joined with a physical body was irrelevant.  The essence of a person, and his identity, was his soul, and his soul alone.  The ethereal (astral) body hypothesis has largely been ignored in philosophy, but is perhaps best represented in mythologies, folk tales, religious representations, literature and movies.  It is the idea that a person continues to exist after their physical death as some sort of ghostly, supernatural immortal apparition that is still in some way recognizable as the deceased individual. 

The question of immortality is closely tied to questions of personhood and personal identity.  Can a person be essentialized to one or more characteristics that maintain personhood and their identity?  To what extent is a body necessary for both personhood and identity?  If a person is resurrected, is it the same person or a replica of the original person?  What (if any) identity conferring properties can be used to positively identify a person who has been reincarnated, resurrected, disembodied, or ethereal? 

Immortality also plays an important role in other areas of philosophy of religion, including the problem of evil and subsequent theodicies.  For instance, why would an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful being (e.g., God) create beings that would suffer death?  Does the death of the physical body serve a divine purpose?  Why would the knowledge that humans are immortal be hidden from them?  Are immortal persons rewarded or punished eternally for their actions during their Earthly life?  If so, is that just? 

The idea that humans and other beings are immortal has largely been taken for granted for most of the history of philosophy.  With the rise of skepticism and atheism in the Modern Era forward, however, arguments for and against immortality have become more and more logically complex, and little is taken for granted. 

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  1. Existence Is Evidence of Immortality.Michael Huemer - manuscript
    Time may be infinite in both directions. If it is, then, if persons could live at most once in all of time, the probability that you would be alive now would be zero. But if persons can live more than once, the probability that you would be alive now would be nonzero. Since you are alive now, with certainty, either the past is finite, or persons can live more than once.
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  2. Multilevel Strategy for Immortality: Plan A – Fighting Aging, Plan B – Cryonics, Plan C – Digital Immortality, Plan D – Big World Immortality.Alexey Turchin - manuscript
    Abstract: The field of life extension is full of ideas but they are unstructured. Here we suggest a comprehensive strategy for reaching personal immortality based on the idea of multilevel defense, where the next life-preserving plan is implemented if the previous one fails, but all plans need to be prepared simultaneously in advance. The first plan, plan A, is the surviving until advanced AI creation via fighting aging and other causes of death and extending one’s life. Plan B is cryonics, (...)
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  3. Digital Immortality: Theory and Protocol for Indirect Mind Uploading.Alexey Turchin - manuscript
    Future superintelligent AI will be able to reconstruct a model of the personality of a person who lived in the past based on informational traces. This could be regarded as some form of immortality if this AI also solves the problem of personal identity in a copy-friendly way. A person who is currently alive could invest now in passive self-recording and active self-description to facilitate such reconstruction. In this article, we analyze informational-theoretical relationships between the human mind, its traces, and (...)
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  4. Classification of Approaches to Technological Resurrection.Alexey Turchin & Chernyakov Maxim - manuscript
    Abstract. Death seems to be a permanent event, but there is no actual proof of its irreversibility. Here we list all known ways to resurrect the dead that do not contradict our current scientific understanding of the world. While no method is currently possible, many of those listed here may become feasible with future technological development, and it may even be possible to act now to increase their probability. The most well-known such approach to technological resurrection is cryonics. Another method (...)
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  5. Schopenhauer on the Futility of Suicide.Colin Marshall - forthcoming - Mind.
    Schopenhauer repeatedly claims that suicide is both foolish and futile. But while many commentators have expressed sympathy for his charge of foolishness, most regard his charge of futility as indefensible even within his own system. In this paper, I offer a defense of Schopenhauer’s futility charge, based on metaphysical and psychological considerations. On the metaphysical front, Schopenhauer’s view implies that psychological connections extend beyond death. Drawing on Parfit’s discussion of personal identity, I argue that those connections have personal significance, such (...)
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  6. What Makes Life Meaningful? A Debate.Thaddeus Metz & Joshua Seachris - 2024 - Routledge.
    What does talk about life’s meaning even mean? Can human life be meaningful? What is God’s role, if any, in a meaningful life? These three questions frame this one-of-a-kind debate between two philosophers who have spent most of their professional lives thinking and writing about the topic of life’s meaning. In this wide-ranging scholarly conversation, Professors Thaddeus Metz and Joshua Seachris develop and defend their own unique answers to these questions, while responding to each other’s objections in a lively dialogue (...)
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  7. Foundations of Human and Animal Sensory Awareness: Descartes and Willis.Deborah Brown & Brian Key - 2023 - In Andrea Strazzoni & Marco Sgarbi (eds.), Reading Descartes. Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning. Florence: Firenze University Press. pp. 81-99.
    In arguing against the likelihood of consciousness in non-human animals, Descartes advances a slippery slope argument that if thought were attributed to any one animal, it would have to be attributed to all, which is absurd. This paper examines the foundations of Thomas Willis’ comparative neuroanatomy against the background of Descartes’ slippery slope argument against animal consciousness. Inspired by Gassendi’s ideas about the corporeal soul, Thomas Willis distinguished between neural circuitry responsible for reflex behaviour and that responsible for cognitively or (...)
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  8. Time and Eternity.James H. Cumming - 2023 - Dogma: Revue de Philosophie Et de Sciences Humaines 22:58-67.
    This article is the FIFTH of several excerpts from my book The Nondual Mind: Vedānta, Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism, and Spinoza (the full book is posted on this site). “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment find a precursor (...)
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  9. The Desire for Immortality: The Posthuman Bodies in Ken Liu’s The Waves.Junge Dou - 2023 - Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy 6.
    In the industrial era, advanced science and technology make immortality-obsessed human beings constantly develop, modify, and reshape their bodies and consciousness, to overcome the fragility and transience of their bodies and approach the dream of immortality. The transformation of the body, in turn, drives society to confront the co-existence of cyborg, transhuman, information subject, nomadic posthuman and other life forms. Focusing on Chinese-American writer Ken Liu’s science fiction the Future Trilogy, Arc, and The Waves, this paper attempts to explore the (...)
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  10. Why Kant’s Hope Took a Historical Turn in Practical Philosophy.Jaeha Woo - 2023 - Con-Textos Kantianos 17:43-55.
    In the beginning of his critical period, Kant treated the perfect attainment of the highest good—the unconditioned totality of ends which would uphold the perfect proportionality between moral virtue and happiness—as both the ground of hope for deserved happiness and the final end of our moral life. But I argue that Kant moved in the direction of de-emphasizing the latter aspect of the highest good, not because it is inappropriate or impossible for us to promote this ideal, but because the (...)
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  11. Agency, Narrative, and Mortality.Roman Altshuler - 2022 - In Luca Ferrero (ed.), Routledge Handbook for the Philosophy of Agency. New York: Routledge. pp. 385-393.
    Narrative views of agency and identity arise in opposition to reductionism in both domains. While reductionists understand both identity and agency in terms of their components, narrativists respond that life and action are both constituted by narratives, and since the components of a narrative gain their meaning from the whole, life and action not only incorporate their constituent parts but also shape them. I first lay out the difficulties with treating narrative as constitutive of metaphysical identity and turn to its (...)
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  12. When Will Survival Researchers Move Past Defending the Indefensible?Keith Augustine - 2022 - Journal of Scientific Exploration 36 (2):412-435.
    The failure of five psychical researchers to confront my critique of Bigelow Institute contest-winning essays with counterpoints or concessions responsive to its novel criticisms is disappointing. Their defensive and scattershot reply lost sight of whether the critiqued essays met their directive to provide "hard evidence 'beyond a reasonable doubt'" of the survival of human consciousness. In the critique I also questioned the scientific validity of seeking ostensible evidence for discarnate personal survival without giving due care to potential evidence against it, (...)
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  13. Answering More of the Same: A Reply to Nahm.Keith Augustine - 2022 - Journal of Scientific Exploration 36 (4):794-808.
    Michael Nahm's preceding commentary accuses me of seven misrepresentations. One of these is an acknowledged good-faith error about a peripheral detail, while the remaining six are demonstrably accurate descriptions of Nahm's statements. At the same time, Nahm verifiably misrepresents me frequently and intentionally over issues that he takes to be consequential, which is a much more serious offense. All authors should call out when an interlocutor get their points wrong, but only when they can definitively back up the charge. Where (...)
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  14. Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life: Precis and Further Reflections.John Martin Fischer - 2022 - The Journal of Ethics 26 (3):341-359.
    I offer an overview of the book, _Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life_, summarizing the main issues, arguments, and conclusions (Fischer 2020). I also present some new ideas and further developments of the material in the book. A big part of this essay is drawing connections between the specific issues treated in the book and those in other areas of philosophy, and in particular, the theory of agency and moral responsibility. I highlight some striking similarities of both structure and content (...)
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  15. Replies to Timmerman and Gorman.John Martin Fischer - 2022 - The Journal of Ethics 26 (3):395-414.
    In my reply to the thoughtful comments of Timmerman and Gorman, I take up, and further explore, some main questions, including: Can a horribly immoral person (a moral monster) lead a meaningful life? Similarly, can a significantly deluded person lead a meaningful life? What role do judgments of meaningfulness play in our normative framework? How can we understand the debate between those who would embrace the possibility of immortality and those who would reject it? What is the role of narrativity (...)
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  16. Holism, Particularity, and the Vividness of Life.August Gorman - 2022 - The Journal of Ethics (3):1-15.
    John Martin Fischer’s Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life puts forth a view that individual experiences could provide us with sources of endless fascination, motivation, and value if only we could live forever to continue to enjoy them. In this article I advocate for more caution about embracing this picture by pointing to three points of tension in Fischer's book. First, I argue that taking meaningfulness in life to be holistic is not compatible with the view immortal lives would be (...)
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  17. Immortal Beauty: Does Existence Confirm Reincarnation?Jens Jäger - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (4):789-807.
    I argue that a popular view about self-locating evidence implies that there are cases in which agents have surprisingly strong evidence for their own reincarnation. The central case is an ‘Immortal Beauty' scenario, modelled after the well-known Sleeping Beauty puzzle. I argue that if the popular ‘thirder’ solution to the puzzle is correct, then Immortal Beauty should be confident that she's going to be reincarnated. The essay also examines another pro-reincarnation argument due to Michael Huemer (2021). I argue that his (...)
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  18. Unsterblichkeit 2.0.Jobst Landgrebe & Barry Smith - 2022 - In Ludger Jansen & Rebekka A. Klein (eds.), Seele digital? Mind uploading, virtuelles Bewusstsein und christliche Auferstehungshoffnung. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet. pp. 69-83.
    Das in diesem Aufsatz vorgebrachte Argumentationsmuster hat folgende Schritte: 1. Der menschliche Geist ist vom Körper nicht trennbar, sie bilden ein Kontinuum. 2. Unser Bewusstsein und alle darauf aufbauenden geistigen Phänomene sind die Emanation eines materiellen Prozesses, den ein komplexes System verursacht. 3. Komplexe Systeme lassen sich mathematisch nicht modellieren und nicht kausal verstehen. 4. Computer sind Turing-Maschinen. Sie können nur mathematische Modelle berechnen. Es wird niemals Hyper-Turing Maschinen geben, und wenn es sie gäbe, könnten sie auch nur mathematische Modelle (...)
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  19. Beyond the BICS Essay Contest: Envisioning a More Rigorous Preregistered Survival Study.Etienne LeBel, Keith Augustine & Adam Rock - 2022 - Journal of Scientific Exploration 36 (2):436-447.
    Prior experimental studies of anomalous information reception (AIR) have been touted as strong evidence for postmortem survival of consciousness yet are plagued by several methodological weaknesses that preclude clear evidence of positive results. The present team provides an adversarial collaboration to identify and compensate for the major limitations of these previous approaches. We outline a more rigorous preregistered study design that eliminates or minimizes researcher bias in (a) data cleaning and (b) statistical analysis. Obtaining positive results with our recommended design (...)
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  20. Everything and More: The Prospects of Whole Brain Emulation.Eric Mandelbaum - 2022 - Journal of Philosophy 119 (8):444-459.
    Whole Brain Emulation has been championed as the most promising, well-defined route to achieving both human-level artificial intelligence and superintelligence. It has even been touted as a viable route to achieving immortality through brain uploading. WBE is not a fringe theory: the doctrine of Computationalism in philosophy of mind lends credence to the in-principle feasibility of the idea, and the standing of the Human Connectome Project makes it appear to be feasible in practice. Computationalism is a popular, independently plausible theory, (...)
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  21. Does the Lack of Cosmic Meaning Make Our Lives Bad?Thaddeus Metz - 2022 - Journal of Value Inquiry 56 (1):37-50.
    This article is part of a special issue devoted to David Benatar’s anti-natalism. There are places in his oeuvre where he contends that, while our lives might be able to exhibit some terrestrial or human meaning, that is not enough to make them worth creating, which would require a cosmic meaning that is unavailable to us. There are those who maintain, in reply to Benatar, that some of our lives do have a cosmic meaning, but I argue that Benatar is (...)
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  22. Death and Persistence.Rebekah L. H. Rice - 2022 - Cambridge:: Cambridge University Press.
    The idea that physical death may not mark the end of an individual's existence has long been a source of fascination. It is perhaps unsurprising that we are apt to wonder what it is that happens to us when we die. Is death the end of me and all the experiences that count as mine? Or might I exist, and indeed have experiences, beyond the time of my death? And yet, deep metaphysical puzzles arise at the very suggestion that persons (...)
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  23. The Significance of Future Generations.Roman Altshuler - 2021 - In Michael Cholbi & Travis Timmerman (eds.), Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. Routledge. pp. 191-199.
    We find meaning and value in our lives by engaging in everyday projects. But, according to a recent argument by Samuel Scheffler, this value doesn’t depend merely on what the projects are about. In many cases, it depends also on the future generations that will replace us. By imagining the imminent extinction of humanity soon after our own deaths, we can recognize both that much of our current valuing depends on a background confidence in the ongoing survival of humanity and (...)
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  24. Review of Immortality and the Philosophy of Death. [REVIEW]Subhasis Chattopadhyay - 2021 - Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India 126 (August (08)):56.
    The review of this anthology of essays shows the lifelessness of the contributors. They systematically misread everyone from Plato to Kierkegaard. The false ratiocination about love is also foregrounded in this review. Earlier this reviewer had the misfortune to review The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Death . Then an American cloistered Benedictine Abbot wrote to this author in an email this: ""Yes, indeed, the book is not very serious. When the authors die some day, they will understand better, (...)
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  25. Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives.Michael Cholbi & Travis Timmerman (eds.) - 2021 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives is the first book to offer students the full breadth of philosophical issues that are raised by the end of life. Included are many of the essential voices that have contributed to the philosophy of death and dying throughout history and in contemporary research. The 38 chapters in its nine sections contain classic texts and new short argumentative essays, specially commission for this volume by world-leading contemporary experts. Exploring the (...)
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  26. Boredom, Human Psychology, and Immortality.Andreas Elpidorou - 2021 - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (4):259-372.
    Bernard Williams has famously argued that an immortal life would necessarily be boring. Despite the obvious importance that boredom occupies in Williams’ argument, he says very little about the nature of boredom. In this paper, I argue that attention to the empirical literature on boredom reveals a serious flaw in Williams’ argument. Specifically, I show that there is no available explication of boredom that is supported by the empirical research and which at the same time establishes Williams’ conclusions.
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  27. Importance, Fame, and Death.Guy Kahane - 2021 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 90:33-55.
    Some people want their lives to possess importance on a large scale. Some crave fame, or at least wide recognition. And some even desire glory that will only be realised after their death. Such desires are either ignored or disparaged by many philosophers. However, although few of us have a real shot at importance and fame on any grand scale, these can be genuine personal goods when they meet certain further conditions. Importance that relates to positive impact and reflects our (...)
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  28. Reflections on Meaning and Immortality.Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin - 2021 - Ergo 8 (8).
    This article revisits Bernard Williams’s influential argument that an immortal human life would be meaningless and argues for a shift in focus. There’s good reason to keep Williams’s framework for evaluating the prospects of meaning in continued life. But there’s also good reason to abandon the conception of human psychology that he, and most of the vast literature in response, uses to fill in that framework. Focusing on values, as opposed to desires, reveals that the most pressing threats to a (...)
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  29. Predicting Me: The Route to Digital Immortality?Paul Smart - 2021 - In Robert W. Clowes, Klaus Gärtner & Inês Hipólito (eds.), The Mind-Technology Problem: Investigating Minds, Selves and 21st Century Artefacts. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. pp. 185–207.
    An emerging consensus in cognitive science views the biological brain as a hierarchically-organized predictive processing system that relies on generative models to predict the structure of sensory information. Such a view resonates with a body of work in machine learning that has explored the problem-solving capabilities of hierarchically-organized, multi-layer (i.e., deep) neural networks, many of which acquire and deploy generative models of their training data. The present chapter explores the extent to which the ostensible convergence on a common neurocomputational architecture (...)
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  30. Immortality, Boredom, and Standing for Something.David Beglin - 2020 - In Travis Timmerman & Michael Cholbi (eds.), Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives.
    Addresses a common criticism of Williams' so-called "Necessary Boredom Thesis," arguing that the criticism misconstrues the kind of boredom that Williams is worried about. Then offers an independent reason to worry about the Necessary Boredom Thesis, given the relevant construal of boredom. Finally, develops a weaker version of Williams' worries about choosing to live an immortal existence, arguing that immortality threatens to undermine our ability to stand for the things in our lives.
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  31. Review of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death. [REVIEW]Subhasis Chattopadhyay - 2020 - Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India 125 (2):336-37.
    This is a howler of a handbook. The review shows how in the name of academics, philosophers indulge in quid pro quos in high places. They have no clue about what they are writing. As a Benedictine Abbot in the US responded in email to this reviewer: "Yes, indeed, the book is not very serious. When the authors die some day, they will understand better, as we all shall see". Now that death is in the air; we will understand what (...)
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  32. Taking Stock of the Risks of Life Without Death.August Gorman - 2020 - In Travis Timmerman & Michael Cholbi (eds.), Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. Routledge.
    In this chapter I argue that choosing to live forever comes with the threat of an especially pernicious kind of boredom. However, it may be theoretically possible to circumvent it by finding ways to pursue an infinite number of projects consistent with one’s personality, taking on endlessly pursuable endlessly interesting projects, or by rekindling old projects once you’ve forgotten about them. However, each of these possibilities is contingent upon having certain traits that you are likely not currently in a good (...)
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  33. Anya Bernstein. The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia. xv + 270 pp., bibl., index. Princeton, N.J./Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019. $75 (paper). Hardcover and e-book available. [REVIEW]Yvonne Howell - 2020 - Isis 111 (3):693-694.
  34. Das potências da memória. A afirmação da transitoriedade histórica E da eternidade Das ideias.Augusto B. De Carvalho Dias Leite - 2020 - Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 61 (145):107-129.
    RESUMO A partir do exame da tradição heraclitiana e platônica sobre a transitoriedade e a imortalidade - conceitos compreendidos como universais - este artigo defende a seguinte antinomia como tese: para haver temporalidade é preciso haver eternidade. Essa tese é demonstrada por meio do estudo e atualização das noções de alma, espírito, ideia e memória, as quais estão conectadas invariavelmente ao tempo passado como princípio ontológico do fenômeno histórico. Para além do ponto de vista filosófico, portanto, da perspectiva específica do (...)
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  35. Meaning in Life in Spite of Death.Thaddeus Metz - 2020 - In Michael Cholbi & Travis Timmerman (eds.), Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives. Routledge. pp. 253-261.
    In this chapter the author critically explores answers to the question of how immortality would affect the meaningfulness of a person’s life, understood roughly as a life that merits esteem, achieves purposes much more valuable than pleasure, or makes for a good life-story. The author expounds three arguments for thinking that life would be meaningless if it were mortal, and provides objections to them. He then offers a reason for thinking that a mortal life could be meaningful, and responds to (...)
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  36. Aleksandr Nikolaevič Radiščev, L’uomo, la sua mortalità e immortalità. Introduzione a cura di Angela Dioletta Siclari, traduzione e note di Pia Dusi.Aleksandr Nikolaevič Radiščev, Angela Dioletta Siclari & Pia Dusi - 2020 - Parma: E-theca OnLineOpenAccess Edizioni. Edited by Stefano Caroti & Andrea Strazzoni.
    Se Radiščev occupa un posto considerevole nella storia del pensiero russo lo deve non al suo trattato Sull’uomo, la sua mortalità e immortalità [O Čeloveke, o ego smertnosti i bessmertii] bensì al Viaggio da Pietroburgo a Mosca [Putešestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu], opera che gli procurò la condanna a morte da parte di Caterina II, commutata poi nel lungo esilio in Siberia. Qui egli scrisse il suo trattato filosofico che non poche perplessità ha suscitato nei critici, i quali ne hanno (...)
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  37. Near-Death Experiences are Not Evidence for Either Atheism or Theism.Keith Augustine - 2019 - In Joseph W. Koterski & Graham Oppy (eds.), Theism and Atheism: Opposing Viewpoints in Philosophy. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA. pp. 594-596.
    The failure to secure replicable positive results in near-death experience (NDE) target-identification experiments does not establish the nonexistence of any spiritual realms, but it does serve to substantially challenge positive arguments in favor of the existence of spiritual realms from NDE reports. For if veridical paranormal perception occurs during out-of-body experiences (OBEs) or NDEs, why the failure to find it in all of the controlled experiments that have been undertaken to document it thus far? Various explanations can be put forward, (...)
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  38. Will Postmortal Catholics Have “The Right to Die”?Anna Bugajska - 2019 - Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 24 (2):397-433.
    The article discusses the transhumanist and Catholic perspectives on death and immortality within the speculation on the rise of a postmortal society, and asks the question if Catholics have the right to reject immortalist technologies. To address this problem, I first outline the ideas and technology leading to the rise of a postmortal society, and accept Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon as a counterfactual scenario. Further, the naturalistic and Catholic understandings of death are compared, and it is shown that despite (...)
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  39. Kantian Non-evidentialism and its German Antecedents: Crusius, Meier, and Basedow.Brian A. Chance - 2019 - Kantian Review 3 (24):359-384.
    This article aims to highlight the extent to which Kant’s account of belief draws on the views of his contemporaries. Situating the non-evidentialist features of Crusius’s account of belief within his broader account, I argue that they include antecedents to both Kant’s distinction between pragmatic and moral belief and his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason. While moving us closer to Kant’s arguments for the first postulate, however, both Crusius’s and Meier’s arguments for the immortality of the soul (...)
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  40. Mort (Entrée Grand Public, L'Encyclopédie Philosophique).Federico Lauria - 2019 - L'Encyclopédie Philosophique.
    La mort nous afflige, nous angoisse, voire nous terrifie. Qu’est-ce que la mort ? La tristesse et l’angoisse face à la mort sont-elles justifiées ? La mort est-elle un mal ? Vaudrait-il mieux être immortel ? Comment comprendre le deuil ? Cette entrée propose un aperçu des questions principales de la philosophie contemporaine de la mort. Tentons de sonder l’énigme la plus tragique de la vie.
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  41. God, Soul and the Meaning of Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2019 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Part of the Elements Philosophy of Religion series, this short book focuses on the spiritual dimensions of life’s meaning as they have been discussed in the recent English and mainly analytic philosophical literature. The overarching philosophical question that this literature has addressed is about the extent to which, and respects in which, spiritual realities such as God or a soul would confer meaning on our lives. There have been four broad answers to the question, namely: God or a soul is (...)
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  42. Phänomenologische Todesbegriffe.Gregor Schiemann - 2019 - In Inga Römer & Alexander Schnell (eds.), Phänomenologie und Metaphysik. Meiner. pp. 289-306.
    This article discusses the content of life-world experience in Heidegger’s and Husserl’s respective concepts of death. The modern scientification of the life-world has restricted this content, but has not been able to prevent the concepts from continuing to justify the autonomy of the life-worldly experience of death. However, a phenomenological understanding of death can only be achieved if its essential naturalness is taken into account, for which metaphysics could serve phenomenology as a point of departure.
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  43. Tommaso de Vio Gaetano, Pietro Pomponazzi e la polemica sull’immortalità dell’anima. Status quaestionis e nuove scoperte.Annalisa Cappiello - 2018 - Noctua 5 (1):32-71.
    A long historiographical tradition has claimed that the famous Pietro Pomponazzi’s Tractatus de immortalitate animae had been inspired by Tommaso de Vio’s Commentary on De anima – whose basic thesis was that, according to the principles of Aristotelian philosophy, the human soul was mortal – even though Pomponazzi in his entire work never mentioned Caietanus as a model. Firstly, this article frames the status quaestionis focusing on affinities and divergences between the two books and on the possible relationship and exchange (...)
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  44. Always Choose to Live or Choose to Always Live?Daniel Coren - 2018 - Southwest Philosophy Review 34 (2):89-104.
    Bernard Williams (1973) famously argued that if given the choice to relinquish our mortality we should refuse. We should not choose to always live. His piece provoked an entire literature on the desirability of immortality. Intending to contradict Williams, Thomas Nagel claimed that if given the choice between living for a week and dying in five minutes he would always choose to live. I argue that (1) Nagel’s iterating scenario is closer to the original Makropulos case (Čapek’s) that inspired Williams’s (...)
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  45. Two Arguments for Animal Immortality.Blake Hereth - 2018 - In Simon Cushing (ed.), Heaven and Philosophy. New York, NY, USA: pp. 171-200.
    Some, like the Scholastics, held that nonhuman animals could not survive bodily death and would therefore be absent in any afterlife. Against them, I argue that all sentient animals lacking moral agency are immortal and that their immortality is good for them. Call this thesis Animal Immortalism. This paper offers two arguments for Animal Immortalism: the Faultless Harm Argument and the Just Compensation Argument. According to the former, because death and eternal misery are harms to sentient animals to which they (...)
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  46. A Problem for Christian Materialism.Elliot Jon Knuths - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10 (3):205-213.
    This piece raises a new challenge for Christian materialist accounts of human persons. Revisiting one of the perennial challenges for Christian materialism, explaining the metaphysical compatibility of resurrection and the life everlasting with materialist metaphysics, I argue that resuscitation phenomena reported in scripture undermine van Inwagen’s and Zimmerman’s attempts to reconcile resurrection and materialism. Although this challenge to Christian materialism is not insurmountable, it provides good reason to reject several of the most serious Christian materialist projects and offers a reason (...)
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  47. God’s Role in a Meaningful Life: New Reflections from Tim Mawson.Thaddeus Metz - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10 (3):171-191.
    Characteristic of the contemporary field of life's meaning has been the combination of monism in method and naturalism in substance. That is, much of the field has sought to reduce enquiry into life's meaning to one question and to offer a single principle as an answer to it, with this principle typically focusing on ways of living in the physical world as best known by the scientific method. T. J. Mawson's new book, God and the Meanings of Life, provides fresh (...)
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  48. Forever and Again: Necessary Conditions for “Quantum Immortality” and its Practical Implications.Alexey Turchin - 2018 - Journal of Evolution and Technology 28 (1).
    This article explores theoretical conditions necessary for “quantum immortality” (QI) as well as its possible practical implications. It is demonstrated that the QI is a particular case of “multiverse immortality” (MI) which is based on two main assumptions: the very large size of the Universe (not necessary because of quantum effects), and the copy-friendly theory of personal identity. It is shown that a popular objection about the lowering of the world-share (measure) of an observer in the case of QI doesn’t (...)
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  49. Bootstrapping the Afterlife.Roman Altshuler - 2017 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (2).
    Samuel Scheffler defends “The Afterlife Conjecture”: the view that the continued existence of humanity after our deaths—“the afterlife”—lies in the background of our valuing; were we to lose confidence in it, many of the projects we engage in would lose their meaning. The Afterlife Conjecture, in his view, also brings out the limits of our egoism, showing that we care more about yet unborn strangers than about personal survival. But why does the afterlife itself matter to us? Examination of Scheffler’s (...)
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  50. Should I choose to never die? Williams, boredom, and the significance of mortality.David Beglin - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (8):2009-2028.
    Bernard Williams’ discussion of immortality in “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality” has spawned an entire philosophical literature. This literature tends to focus on one of Williams’ central claims: if we were to relinquish our mortality, we would necessarily become alienated from our existence and environment—“bored,” in his terms. Many theorists have defended this claim; many others have challenged it. Even if this claim is false, though, it still isn’t obvious that we should choose to relinquish our (...)
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