Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T15:38:40.703Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Defending heaven's desirability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2019

CLINTON NEPTUNE
CLINTON NEPTUNE*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Loyola University, 1032 West Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60660, USA
*
e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Bernard Williams famously argued that immortality would lead to intolerable tedium. If his conclusion is true, then we ought not desire any sort of blissful-type afterlife (heaven) that precludes death. I reconstruct Williams's argument and examine three possible defeaters for his premises: the possibility of infinite activity kinds, the inability to prefer justifiably non-existence over the enduring of suffering, and the existence of inexhaustible pleasures such as the deepening love relationship between family, friends, and God, if God exists. I will show that further attempts to reboot Williams's argument also fail to rule out the desirability of heaven.

Type
Articles from the 2018 Postgraduate Essay Prize
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 235 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bruckner, Donald W. (2012) ‘Against the tedium of immortality’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 20, 623–644.Google Scholar
Burley, Mikel (2009) ‘Immortality and boredom: a response to Wisnewski’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 65, 77–85.Google Scholar
Fischer, J. M. (1994). ‘Why immortality is not so bad’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2, 257–270.Google Scholar
Fischer, J. M. & Mitchell-Yellin, Benjamin (2014) ‘Immortality and boredom’, Journal of Ethics: An International Philosophical Review, 18, 353–372.Google Scholar
Kagan, Shelly (2012) Death (New Haven: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
Lamont, Corliss (1965) ‘Mistaken attitudes toward death’, Journal of Philosophy, 52, 29–36.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Brian (2011) ‘The problem of heaven’, Ratio, 24, 46–64.Google Scholar
Swinburne, Richard (2017) ‘Why the life of heaven is supremely worth living’, in Ryan Byerly, T. & Silverman, Eric (eds) Paradise Understood: New Philosophical Essays about Heaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 350–360.Google Scholar
Tanyi, Attila & Andric, Vuko (2017) ‘God and eternal boredom’, Religious Studies, 53, 51–70.Google Scholar
Williams, Bernard (1993) ‘The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immorality’, in Fisher, J. M. (ed.) The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford University Press), 73–92.Google Scholar
Wisnewski, Jeremy J. (2005) ‘Is the immortal life worth living?’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 58, 27–36.Google Scholar