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Survival of Bodily Death: a Question of Values
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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Does anyone ever survive his or her bodily death ? Could anyone? No speculative questions are older than these, or have been answered more frequently or more variously. None have been laid to rest more often, or — in our times — with more claimed decisiveness. Jay Rosenberg, for instance, no doubt speaks for many contemporary philosophers when he claims, in his recent book, to have ‘demonstrated’ that ‘ we cannot [even] make coherent sense of the supposed possibility that a person's history might continue beyond that person's [bodily] death’.
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References
1 Thinking Clearly About Death (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1983), p. 96, emphasis added.Google Scholar
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17 Ibid. p. 152.
18 Ibid. p. 153.
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20 Ibid. p. 131.
21 Ibid. p. 136.
22 This sort of example is discussed by Parfit, , Reasons and Persons, op. cit. pp. 199–200, and by Nozick, op. cit. p. 41.Google Scholar
23 I am grateful to several people who offered criticisms and suggestions when I talked on the topic of reincarnation at the University of New Mexico, in March, 1991, and also to John Barresi and Ian Stevenson for written comments on an earlier version of this paper.Google Scholar