Life and Death

Philosophical Perspectives

Two problems

To discuss whether life after death is possible we need to understand two related philosophical problems:– The mind-body problem – The problem of personal identity

Problem of Personal Identity Who am I?

– Option 1: ‘I am my body / physical’ – this view might lead to belief in resurrection of the body

– Option 2: ‘I am my mind / soul’ – this view might lead to belief in rebirth or reincarnation

The Mind / Body Problem

What is the relationship between the mind and the body?

How far do our mental activities, such as thinking, lead to physical actions?

Plato

Dualist Soul = charioteer

Cycle of opposites

Knowledge of the Forms

Plato’s Phaedo

Reincarnation

The cycle of death and rebirth involves intermediate stages where things change = the act of dying and revival

Things are generated from their opposites

Plato – Evaluation

Arguments for Arguments against

Criticism of Plato

Peter Geach rejects Plato’s views:– How can the disembodied soul see

the world of the Forms? Surely seeing is linked to the body?

– Is existence without a body really human existence?

Other philosophers have rejected Plato’s argument from the cycle of opposites. Many things in the universe have opposites but this doesn’t necessarily mean that death and life are the opposite of each other

Descartes

Dualist Doubts the body

‘I think therefore I

am’

Mind can survive death

Descartes – Evaluation

Arguments for Arguments against

Points in favour of Dualism

We often talk as if our ‘selves’ were different from our bodies. Consider the sentence ‘I have a body’

We say that we are the ‘same’ person as we were years ago, despite the fact that our body has changed

We seem to have privileged access to many of our thoughts. In other words, we are able to know what we are thinking, even though others cannot tell

We can doubt we have a body but cannot doubt we have a mind (Descartes)

Points against dualism

Just because our language refers to body and mind distinctly, this does not mean that mind and body are different things

The point that some of our thoughts can be secret does not necessarily imply dualism. This only shows that we can keep some thoughts to ourselves. There are also numerous occasions when it is possible for others to know what I am thinking

Points against dualism

To say that ‘I can doubt that I have a body but I cannot doubt that I exist, therefore I am not a body’ is a false reasoning process. It is similar to ‘Fred can doubt that he is a professor of philosophy but he cannot doubt that he exists, therefore he is not a professor of philosophy’

Is it possible to conceive of yourself as being a disembodied soul? Isn’t so much of what makes you ‘you’ linked to your physical body, your location in space, etc? Doesn’t our concept of person involve reference to bodies?

Ryle’s critique of Dualism

Gilbert Ryle criticised Dualism on the grounds that it posited a ‘ghost in the machine’

He uses the idea of a ‘category mistake’ to criticise dualism. To argue that the mind is some kind of extra object that exists in the body and controls it, is like arguing that ‘team spirit’ can exist separately from the eleven cricketers that make up the team

Aristotle

MonistSoul =

Life of the body

Soul dies with the

body

Different types of

soul

Aristotle – Evaluation

Arguments for Arguments against

Dawkins

Materialist

DNA survival

Humans are physical

The mind is the brain

Dawkins – Evaluation

Arguments for Arguments against

Criticisms of Dawkins

Dawkins presents religious belief as much cruder than it actually is. He criticises a position no serious theologian would wish to maintain

For instance, he compares belief in God to the belief that there is teapot orbiting the planet Pluto

Dawkins does not recognise that there are some questions which are beyond the scope of science, such as ‘why is there anything rather than nothing?’

Hick

Materialist

Replica theory – 3 scenarios

Bodily resurrection

Personal identity

Hick – Evaluation

Arguments for Arguments against

Criticisms of Hick

Hick argues that the replica is the same as the original person because it has the same consciousness, memory and emotions. Others argue that there can only be automatic and unquestionable identification when there is physical continuity

Even Hick acknowledges that any discussion of the nature of life as a replica is impossible – e.g. – What stage of life is the replica a copy

of? – If the original person died from cancer

will the replica also suffer from the disease?

Criticisms of Hick

Penelhum – to say that the person in the afterlife is the same as the one who died is something we can do but we do not have to. Our ordinary use of the term ‘the same’ does not commit us one way or the other

Williams argues that spatio-temporal continuity is the only reliable measure to use. Therefore, resurrection is not logically possible because it involves believing that people can remain the same while crossing the boundaries of time and space