Afterlife

Edited by K. Mitch Hodge (Masaryk University, Queen's University, Belfast)
About this topic
Summary The afterlife, or more specifically the belief in an afterlife, is the belief that it is possible for individuals to survive death.  Scholarly discussions of afterlife beliefs cover a broad range of academic disciplines (e.g., philosophy, religious studies, anthropology and psychology) and philosophically relevant topics (e.g., personal identity, epistemology of religious belief, imagination, ethics, arguments from parapsychology, dualism and materialism).  Beliefs in the afterlife are generally one of two types: metaphysically thin, whereby the some non-identity conferring substance of the individual continues after the death of his/her physical body (e.g., their atoms, or their life force or energy is redistributed into the universe to make up other things); or metaphysically thick, whereby some essential personal identity conferring essence or substance (e.g., the person’s soul , mind or resurrected body) is said to survive either immediately after death, or at some later time.  Most scholarly discussions as well as most religio-cultural systems are concerned with the latter rather than the former.  Metaphysically thick afterlife beliefs usually take one of two forms: reincarnation (also known in the philosophical literature as transmigration of the soul), by which the individual is reborn into this world with a new life, or the individual continues his/her existence in a spiritual realm (e.g., heaven, hell, or the realm of ancestors).  How, and whether, personal identity can be maintained in an afterlife has a long history of debate in philosophy.  In addition, one cross-culturally common and philosophically important element of metaphysically thick afterlife beliefs is that the individual is rewarded or punished for his/her moral propriety or moral transgressions that he/she committed in this life. 
Key works Philosophical discussions of the afterlife date back to Pythagoras unknown and Plato 2008, 1975,  both of whom argued for the transmigration of the soul.  With a rise of Christianity in the West, discussions concerning the afterlife shifted to how personal identity was maintained in the afterlife, especially given the doctrine of the resurrection of the body (see, Sorabji 2006, and Barresi manuscript).  After Descartes 1984 [1641], however, the emphasis in philosophy shifted away from survival after death in a resurrected body, to the idea that one survives death as a disembodied mind.  The modern era saw the first substantial skeptical challenge to belief in an afterlife with Coleman 2007, ms.  Contemporary philosophical discussions of the afterlife have focused on the possibility of disembodied existence and how this is to be understood (see Blose 1981, Gillett 1985, 1986, Tye 1983, Hick 1976, 1973, Swinburne 1986, Mavrodes 1977, Penelhum 1982, and Perry 1977).  In addition, with the rise of the cognitive science of religion, and experimental evidence (see Bering 2006) that humans intuitively believe in an afterlife, philosophical debate has begun on how and why the human mind is predisposed toward this belief, and the role the imagination, emotions and concepts play in representing the deceased and the afterlife (see Bek & Lock 2011, Paul & Rita 2006, Nichols 2007 and Hodge 2011, 2011).
Introductions Encyclopedia articles include Hasker 2010Andrade 2011 (on immortality).  Good introductory books to the topics dealing with the afterlife include: Corcoran 2001, Benatar 2004, Sorabji 2006, and Barresi manuscript.
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  1. Review of Barbara Klinger: Immortal Films: “Casablanca” and the Afterlife of a Hollywood Classic[REVIEW]Pamela Robertson Wojcik - 2024 - Critical Inquiry 50 (2):373-374.
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  2. Evil and Embodiment: Towards a Latter-day Saint Non-Identity Theodicy.Taylor-Grey Miller & Derek Christian Haderlie - forthcoming - Religious Studies.
    We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God’s soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day saint theology has the resources (...)
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  3. Immortal animals, subtle bodies, or separated souls: the afterlife in Leibniz, Wolff, and their followers.Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero - 2023 - Intellectual History Review 33 (4):651-671.
    Christian Wolff’s attitude towards Leibniz’s legacy is a notoriously vexed question in the history of eighteenth-century German philosophy. In reaction against the untenable traditional depiction o...
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  4. Fine-tuning and the Afterlife in Aquinas.Mirela Oliva - 2023 - Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 79 (1-2):233-260.
    Does the fine-tuning of the universe for life continue in the afterlife? Aquinas would answer yes. In his view, the cosmic conditions post-apocalypse are set to support the resurrected body and the sensible knowledge of God’s majesty as reflected in the renewed material creature. The renewed universe is, thus, fine-tuned for immortal human life. In the first part, I present Aquinas’ version of fine-tuning, referring to earthly life and the afterlife. I distinguish between two modes of fine-tuning: organic and cognitive. (...)
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  5. Astronism and the Astronic Religious Tradition.[author unknown] - 2023 - International Journal for the Study of New Religions 12 (1):3-31.
    A new religion was founded in 2013 that goes by the name of Astronism while its community of followers are known as Astronists. This article gives a rigorous account of the eschatology, soteriology and worldview of this new space religion while contextualizing its emergence as part of a broader Astronic religious tradition. This proposed tradition may itself possess prehistoric roots in the Upper Palaeolithic in the earliest human observations of the night sky. Human beings in turn came to establish a (...)
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  6. When the Digital Continues After Death Ethical Perspectives on Death Tech and the Digital Afterlife.Anna Puzio - 2023 - Communicatio Socialis 56 (3):427-436.
    Nothing seems as certain as death. However, what if life continues digitally after death? Companies and initiatives such as Amazon, Storyfile, Here After AI, Forever Identity and LifeNaut are dedicated to precisely this objective: using avatars, records, and other digital content of the deceased, they strive to enable a digital continuation of life. The deceased live on digitally, and at times, these can even appear very much alive-perhaps too alive? This article explores the ethical implications of these technologies, commonly known (...)
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  7. Death, burial, and the afterlife.Philip Cottrell & Wolfgang Marx (eds.) - 2014 - Dublin, Ireland: Carysfort Press.
    The essays in this volume share an ambitious interest in investigating death as an individual, social, and metaphorical phenomenon that may be exemplified by themes involving burial rituals, identity, and commemoration. The disciplines represented are as diverse as art history, classics, history, music, languages and literatures, and the approaches taken reflect various aspects of contemporary death studies.
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  8. The Final Countdown: Fascism, Jazz, and the Afterlife.Lidija Šumah - 2023 - Filozofski Vestnik 43 (2).
    The general question underlying this article is whether it is possible to turn a paradox into a productive principle. The article approaches this question through Adorno’s and Dainotto’s analyses of the jazz movement in fascist Italy. Jazz was marked by a specific paradox: on the one hand, it was banned due to its African American roots, and as such did not adhere to or glorify the Italian tradition; on the other hand, jazz served very well to protect the nationalist interests (...)
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  9. What the Experience of Transience Tells Us About the Afterlife.Line Ryberg Ingerslev - 2022 - TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 8 (1).
    Sigmund Freud’s reflections on transience left him surprised that someone could revolt against the process of mourning. In Jonathan Lear’s interpretation of transience, the revolt is not simply a passing struggle of the mind, but a response to a difficulty of reality, that is, an existential struggle. Central to the experience of transience, according to Lear, is the disbelief in the existence of an afterlife. How might we understand the idea of an afterlife philosophically? I first consider three different philosophical (...)
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  10. The Astronist System.[author unknown] - 2023 - Preston: Voice of Cosmos.
    Cometan began writing the Omnidoxy, the founding text of Astronism, at the age of seventeen in 2015 and this first great treatise of the Astronist religion was published in 2019. Since then, the world has been introduced to Astronism and its central doctrine of transcension and its worldview of cosmocentrism but the time has come to reflect on the Omnidoxy. The Astronist System explores the major themes of the Omnidoxy including cosmic organicism, astrogenism, returnism and transcension and provides rigorous detail (...)
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  11. Poetic Myths of the Afterlife: Plato’s Last Song.Gerard Naddaf - 2016 - In Rick Benitez & Keping Wang (eds.), Reflections on Plato’s Poetics: Essays from Beijing. Berrima: Academic Printing and Publishing. pp. 111-136.
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  12. From Paris to Rome, Hamburg and London. Aspects of the Afterlife of Giordano Bruno in the Twentieth Century.François Quiviger - 2013 - In Anne Eusterschulte & Henning S. Hufnagel (eds.), Turning traditions upside down: rethinking Giordano Bruno's enlightenment. Central European University Press. pp. 237-248.
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  13. J. J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words.Eli Friedlander - 2004 - Harvard University Press.
    Eli Friedlander reads Rousseau's autobiography, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as philosophy. Reading this work against Descartes's Meditations, Friedlander shows how Rousseau's memorable transformation of experience through writing opens up the possibility of affirming even the most dejected state of being and allows the emergence of the innocence of nature out of the ruins of all social attachments. In tracing the re-creation of a human subject in reverie, Friedlander is alive to the very form of the experience of reading the (...)
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  14. Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion.Sarah Hammerschlag - 2016 - New York: Columbia University Press.
    Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of philosophy, articulating this placement through religion and literature. Chronicling the interactions between these thinkers, Sarah Hammerschlag argues that the stakes in their respective positions were more than philosophical. They were also political. Levinas's investments were born out in his writings on Judaism and (...)
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  15. The Life and Afterlife of Phenomenology in Archaeological Theory and Practice.Holley Moyes - 2023 - In Patrick Londen, Jeffrey Yoshimi & Philip Walsh (eds.), Horizons of Phenomenology: Essays on the State of the Field and Its Applications. Springer Verlag. pp. 307-324.
    In 1994, Christopher Tilley published his treatise, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments, that stimulated what has been referred to as the phenomenological “moment” in archaeology. Invoking Heideggerian phenomenology and following Merleau-Ponty, Tilley’s methods met with harsh criticism among many in the archaeological community. To some, Tilley’s hyper-interpretive methods lacked rigor and had the problem of imposing one’s own feelings and observations onto the people of the past without considering the cultural contexts and symbolic meanings imbued in past (...)
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  16. A Buddhist Response to Olla Solomyak: “The World to Come: A Perspective”.Bronwyn Finnigan - forthcoming - In Yujin Nagasawa & Mohammad Saleh Zarepour (eds.), Global Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion: From Religious Experience to the Afterlife. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter provides a Buddhist response to Olla Solomyak's (forthcoming) account of the afterlife from the perspective of Hasidic Judaism.
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  17. Les concepts du Bouddhisme ancien (dans la langue d'aujourd'hui) (3rd edition).Roberto Arruda (ed.) - 2023 - Sao Paulo: Terra à Vista.
    Bouddha n'a pas érigé de religion. Dans les dimensions culturelles lointaines de son époque, il a fait de la philosophie et de la science. Si nous observons les racines de sa pensée et l'histoire de la connaissance humaine, nous nous rendrons compte qu'il a été, à sa manière, le précurseur du réalisme scientifique, de la psychanalyse, de la philosophie analytique, de l'existentialisme, du féminisme, de l'épistémologie, de la théorie et de la critique de la connaissance, de la psychologie sociale, de (...)
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  18. St. Thomas Aquinas's Concept of a Person.Christopher Hauser - 2022 - NTU Philosophical Review 64:191-230.
    This article develops an argument in defense of the claim that Aquinas holds that there are some kinds of activities which can be performed only by persons. In particular, it is argued that Aquinas holds that only persons can engage in the activities proper to a rational nature, e.g., the activities of intellect and will. Next, the article turns to discuss two implications of this thesis concerning Aquinas’s concept of a person. First, the thesis can be used to resolve a (...)
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  19. Mechanism for Awareness after Death 12 23 2022.Paul Merriam - manuscript
    The only processes that could correlate to awareness thatgo on after brain-death are quantum processes. These processes contain information. But in quantum mechanics information is never lost. Therefore this information goes on after death and the awareness will still be correlated to it. Therefore awareness goes on after death.
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  20. Examining a Late Development in Kant’s Conception of Our Moral Life: On the Interactions among Perfectionism, Eschatology, and Contentment in Ethics.Jaeha Woo - 2024 - TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 8 (1).
    In the first half, I suggest that Kant’s conception of our moral life goes through a significant shift after 1793, with reverberations in his eschatology. The earlier account, based on the postulate of immortality, describes our moral life as an endless pursuit of the highest good, but all this changes in the later account, and I point out three possible reasons for this change of heart. In the second half, I explore how the considerations Kant brings up to argue for (...)
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  21. The Afterlife Dilemma.Marlowe Kerring - manuscript
    This article is meant to provide a brief, accessible introduction to the Afterlife Dilemma--an argument challenging a popular Christian pro-life position. A more in-depth and nuanced treatment of the argument can be found in “The Afterlife Dilemma: A Problem for the Christian Pro-Life Movement,” published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas 2(2) (2022), available online.
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  22. The afterlife of fictional media violence. A genetic phenomenology of emotions following Husserl and Freud.Christian Ferencz-Flatz - 2022 - Continental Philosophy Review 55 (3):289-308.
    Ever since the 1960s, media and communication studies have abounded in heated debates concerning the psychological and social effects of fictional media violence. Massive empirical research has first tried to tie film violence to cultivating either fear or aggressive tendencies among its viewership, while later research has focused on other media as well (television, video games). The present paper does not aim to settle the factual question of whether or not medial experiences indeed engender real emotional dispositions. Instead, it brings (...)
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  23. Correction to: The afterlife of fictional media violence. A genetic phenomenology of emotions following Husserl and Freud.Christian Ferencz-Flatz - 2022 - Continental Philosophy Review 55 (3):309-309.
  24. Scenes of subjection’ & subjectivity : punishment, torture, captivity, annihilation and genocide of (queer) black girls and women in the ‘afterlife of slavery.Peace And Love El Henson - 2018 - Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin
    This article explores black girls and women’s experiences with school, police and state disciplinary torture in the ‘afterlife of slavery.’ More precisely, this work explores the punishment, torture, captivity, annihilation and ultimate genocide black girls and women are subjected to by white supremacist, antiblack, hetero-patriarchal, hetero-sexist, and heteronormative school staff, police and state forces in public schools and beyond. A few research questions are explored: What are black girls and women’s experiences with punishment, torture, captivity, annihilation and genocide by police (...)
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  25. Afterlife.Eric Steinhart - 2021 - In S. Goetz and C. Taliaferro (ed.), Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion. Malden, MA, USA: pp. 1-6.
    Ancient theories of life after death involve souls and gods. Reincarnation theories say an immortal soul travels from one mortal body to another. Lives are shaped by karmic laws, which may be retributive or progressive. Resurrection theories say that persons are bodies. After you die, God will revive your body, or reassemble it from its atoms, or recover it from information stored in the divine memory or your soul, or replicate it in another universe. Modern afterlife theories rely heavily on (...)
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  26. A Naturalistic Afterlife: Evolution, Ordinary Existence, Eternity.David Harmon - 2017 - Cham: Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan.
    This book provides a fresh look at one of the most enduring, absorbing, and universal questions human beings face: What happens to us after we die? In secular thought, the standard answer is simple: we disappear into oblivion. David Harmon takes us in a different direction, by making the case that a nonconscious portion of our personality survives death-literally, not figuratively-and explains how this kind of naturalistic afterlife can be emotionally relevant to us while we are still living. Combining insights (...)
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  27. Race in the Afterlife: An Eastern Christian Approach.Nathan Placencia - 2022 - In Joshua Matthan Brown & James Siemens (eds.), Eastern Christian Approaches to Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 281-301.
    In a previous paper, I addressed the question: Will there be races in heaven? (Placencia, 2021 ). There I argued that the answer to that question depends on one’s view of heaven and one’s account of race. After sorting out these concepts, I defended the conclusion that racial identity, but not race, is compatible with the mainstream Christian account of the afterlife. However, I left open the question of whether deflationary realist races (what I will refer to as minimalist races (...)
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  28. Tracing an intellectual afterlife in library and archival sources : Raymond Klibansky and his Warburg Library networks.Jillian Tomm - 2018 - In Philippe Despoix & Jillian Tomm (eds.), Raymond Klibansky and the Warburg Library Network: Intellectual Peregrinations From Hamburg to London and Montreal. Mcgill-Queen's University Press. pp. 108-139.
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  29. Illuminating Jewish thought: explorations of free will, the afterlife, and the Messianic era.Netanel Wiederblank - 2018 - New Milford, CT: Maggid Books.
    ¿It is more important to me to explain a [philosophical] principle than any other thing that I teach.¿ (Rambam, Mishna Berachot, 9:7)Illuminating Jewish Thought is a contemporary, multi-volume series that surveys the theological foundations of Jewish faith. With the approach and scope of a master educator for undergraduate and rabbinical students at Yeshiva University, Rabbi Wiederblank brings together a wide array of Jewish texts ranging from philosophical to Kabbalistic, ancient to modern, in a clear and accessible source book. In this (...)
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  30. The philosophy of death reader: cross-cultural readings on immortality and the afterlife.Markar Melkonian (ed.) - 2019 - New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
    The Philosophy of Death Reader presents a collection of classic readings from across the centuries and the continents. Organised around central metaphysical questions from whether soul is immortal to what can experience death, it brings together pivotal readings from ancient, modern and contemporary philosophers. The twenty-four readings require no background in philosophy. Featuring writings from Vedanta, the ancient Greeks, the Buddhist tradition, Christian eschatology, and recent analytic philosophy, they flow thematically and cover: - Key metaphysical topics including immortality, rebirth and (...)
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  31. Look Back in Angst: Akaler Sandhaney, the Indian New Wave, and the Afterlife of the IPTA Movement.Manishita Dass - 2021 - In Sanjukta Sunderason & Lotte Hoek (eds.), Forms of the left in postcolonial South Asia: aesthetics, networks and connected histories. Bloomsbury Academic.
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  32. The afterlife of Moses: exile, democracy, renewal.Michael Steinberg - 2022 - Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
    In The Afterlife of Moses, Steinberg addresses the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics, of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. Motivated in part by this recent period of reactionary insurgency in the US, Europe, and Israel, this work of intellectual history articulates the way in which a critique of myths of origin as a principle of democratic government, affect, and citizenship has equal relevance in (...)
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  33. Afterlife.Raymond J. VanArragon - 2022 - In Mark A. Lamport (ed.), The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Philosophy and Religion. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
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  34. The Beatification Story of Irene Mary & Derrick Taylor.Irene Mary Taylor & Derrick Taylor - 2022 - Preston: Cometanica.
    The initial foundations to the notion that Cometan's grandparents, Irene Mary Taylor and Derrick Taylor, should be recognised for their life as laypeople in the Roman Catholic Church first emerged in January 2020 and October 2021 respectively. Irene Mary was well known for her devotion to Catholicism among her family and acquaintances, yet Cometan saw in her icon and life events an opportunity to reinvigorate Catholic fervour in England and abroad. In his own endeavour as a religious figure and philosopher (...)
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  35. The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife by Gregory Shushan.Michael Grosso - 2022 - Journal of Scientific Exploration 36 (2).
    Our culture allows us to quantify death with precise statistics. We know that at least a million Americans so far have lost their lives to Covid-19. We have the daily numbers of mass killings in the United States; of those killed at the hands of Vladimir Putin’s criminal war; of deaths due to starvation, specific diseases, obesity, psychosis, suicide, and so on. There are new technologies that claim they will be able to predict exactly when we will die from natural (...)
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  36. Not So Fast: A Response to Augustine’s Critique of the BICS Contest.Stephen Braude, Imants Barušs, Arnaud Delorme, Dean Radin & Helané Wahbeh - 2022 - Journal of Scientific Exploration 36 (2):399-411.
    Keith Augustine’s critical evaluation of the essay contest sponsored by the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies (BICS) is an interesting but problematic review. It mixes reasonable and detailed criticisms of the contest and many of the winning essays with a disappointing reliance on some of the most trite and superficial criticisms of parapsychological research. Ironically, Augustine criticizes the winning essays for using straw-man arguments and cherry-picked evidence even though many of his own arguments commit these same errors.
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  37. 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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  38. 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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  39. How Not to Do Survival Research: Reflections on the Bigelow Institute Essay Competition.Keith Augustine - 2022 - Journal of Scientific Exploration 36 (2):366-398.
    The recent Bigelow Institute contest rewarding the "best" evidence for life after death epitomizes much of what's wrong with the current state of survival research, its participants constituting a who's who list of contemporary survival researchers. Cases that are regularly hyped as among the best evidence for an afterlife are all too often easily susceptible to normal explanations--if only survival researchers would give them a chance. The consistently negative results of 121 years of experimental survival research ought to have spurred (...)
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  40. Humanist Redemption and Afterlife: The Frankfurt School in Communist Romania.Alexandru Cistelecan - 2022 - Historical Materialism 30 (2):56-90.
    This paper discusses the reception of Frankfurt School critical theory in Communist Romania. After some opening remarks concerning the relevance of this topic, Section 2 sketches the evolving political and historical contexts that circumscribed this philosophical reception. The content and configuration of the Romanian reception of critical theory is then discussed in a double sequence: first (Section 3), by surveying and analysing the main clusters of arguments developed in these texts, which are filtered and classified into four categories: a) general (...)
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  41. The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters. [REVIEW]Scott D. G. Ventureyra - 2014 - Science Et Esprit 66 (3):490-494.
  42. The Astronist Statement. Cometan - 2022 - Preston, UK: Astral Publishing.
    The Astronist Statement on the Situation of the Human Species, often simply referred to as The Astronist Statement, is a non-technical manifesto of the Astronist philosophy and religion, altogether referenced as the Astronist belief system. It provides a summary of the Astronist perspective on the human condition as this pertains to and is influenced by the ultimate goals of Astronism and the purposes it prescribes to human life through its doctrines on transcension, cosmocentrism, suronality and astrosis. The Astronist Statement is (...)
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  43. Astronism: the religion of the stars. Cometan - 2022 - Preston, UK: Astronist Institution.
    Astronism: the religion of the stars is a technical summary of the Astronist religion and philosophy that uses terminology unique to the Astronists and specialised knowledge of Astronist beliefs. It is the perfect brief introduction to Astronism for those with prior understanding of the academic disciplines of eschatology, soteriology, theology and philosophy as the Astronist view on all of these subject areas and more is provided. Astronism: the religion of the stars attempts to explain the narrative that underlies Astronist beliefs (...)
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  44. Thomas Aquinas on Separated Souls as Incomplete Human Person.Brandon Dahm & Daniel De Haan - 2019 - The Thomist 83 (4):589-637.
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  45. The Role of Afterlife Myths in Plato's Moral Arguments.Daniel William Issler - unknown
    I will address the issue of Plato’s use of myths concerning the afterlife in the context of the ethical arguments of the Gorgias, Phaedo and Republic, and I will contend that while the arguments in each dialogue are aimed at convincing the rational part of the self, the myths are aimed at persuading the non-rational part of the self. In support of this interpretation, I will examine Plato’s views on the relation between the different parts of the soul and the (...)
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  46. Heavenly creatures? Visions of animal afterlife in seventeenth-century England.Lloyd Strickland - 2022 - Journal of Religious History, Literature, and Culture 1 (8):1-24.
    This article offers an extensive study of the idea of an animal afterlife in seventeenth-century England. While some have argued that the idea of an animal afterlife became prevalent at the time due to increased awareness of animals’ mental abilities, others have suggested it was due to greater sensitivity to animal suffering and the perceived need to square this suffering with divine justice. I show that both views are incorrect, and that seventeenth-century thinking about an animal afterlife was first and (...)
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  47. Persons, Souls, and Life After Death.Christopher Hauser - 2021 - In William Simpson, Robert C. Koons & James Orr (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature. New York, NY, USA: pp. 245-266.
    Thomistic Hylomorphists claim that we human persons have rational or intellective souls which can continue to exist separately from our bodies after we die. Much of the recent scholarly discussion of Thomistic Hylomorphism has centered on this thesis and the question of whether human persons can survive death along with their souls or whether only their souls can survive in this separated, disembodied, post-mortem state. As a result, two rival versions of Thomistic Hyomorphism have been formulated: Survivalism and Corruptionism. This (...)
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  48. The Afterlife of Decriminalisation: Anti-trafficking, Child Protection, and the Limits of Trauma-informed Efforts.Jennifer Lynne Musto - 2022 - Ethics and Social Welfare 16 (2):169-192.
    Numerous laws have passed to move away from criminalising youth who trade sex. Specialised courts have also been established to support youth. Despite proponents' contention that specialised, trauma-informed courts are less punitive than typical interventions, research is limited. This article explores one specialised dependency court's efforts to assist youth ‘at risk’. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations, I argue that laws and trauma-informed court interventions intensify the supervision of youth and families while inadvertently concealing the gendered-racialised effects of child welfare (...)
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  49. A Course on the Afterlife of Plato’s Symposium.James Lesher - 2004 - Classical Journal 100:75-85.
    A course on the afterlife of Plato’s Symposium can accomplish two worthwhile objectives. It can afford students an opportunity to study a philosophical and literary masterpiece, and it can introduce them to some of the main currents in modern European culture. One recent iteration of such a course addressed six questions: (1) Why might Plato have chosen to write a dialogue about a ‘drinking party’? (2) Why did Plato present multiple speeches on the nature of Eros? (3) Why have some (...)
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  50. Wrongful Procreation, Factory Farming, and the Afterlife.Dustin Crummett - 2021 - Faith and Philosophy 38 (3):337-358.
    Sometimes, I can affect whether an individual is created, but not how their life goes if they’re created. If their life will be bad enough, I apparently wrong them by allowing their creation. But sometimes, popular religious views imply that the created individual is guaranteed to have an infinitely good existence on balance. Since, I argue, I don’t wrong someone by allowing their creation when it’s infinitely good for them on balance, these views apparently have unacceptable implications for procreation ethics. (...)
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