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The Myth of an Afterlife
The Case against Life After Death
Authors:
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Publisher:
2015
Summary
Because every single one of us will die, most of us would like to know what—if anything—awaits us afterward, not to mention the fate of lost loved ones. Given the nearly universal vested interest in deciding this question in favor of an afterlife, it is no surprise that the vast majority of books on the topic affirm the reality of life after death without a backward glance. But the evidence of our senses and the ever-gaining strength of scientific evidence strongly suggest otherwise.
In The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death, Michael Martin and Keith Augustine collect a series of contributions that redress this imbalance in the literature by providing a strong, comprehensive, and up-to-date casebook of the chief arguments against an afterlife. Divided into four separate sections, this collection opens with a broad overview of the issues, as contributors consider the strongest evidence of whether or not we survive death—in particular the biological basis of all mental states and their grounding in brain activity that ceases to function at death. Next, contributors consider a host of conceptual and empirical difficulties that confront the various ways of “surviving” death—from bodiless minds to bodily resurrection to any form of posthumous survival. Then essayists turn to internal inconsistencies between traditional theological conceptions of an afterlife—heaven, hell, karmic rebirth—and widely held ethical principles central to the belief systems supporting those notions. In the final section, authors offer critical evaluations of the main types of evidence for an afterlife.
Fully interdisciplinary, The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death brings together a variety of fields of research to make that case, including cognitiveneuroscience, philosophy of mind, personal identity, philosophy of religion, moralphilosophy, psychical research, and anomalistic psychology. As the definitive casebookof arguments against life after death, this collection is required reading for anyinstructor, researcher, and student of philosophy, religious studies, or theology. It issure to raise provocative issues new to readers, regardless of background, from thosewho believe fervently in the reality of an afterlife to those who do not or are undecidedon the matter.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2015
ISBN-Print
978-0-8108-8677-3
ISBN-Online
978-0-8108-8678-0
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
675
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Foreword No access
Preface No access
1 Introduction No access Pages 1 - 48
2 Dead as a Doornail No access
3 Explaining Personality No access
4 Dissolution into Death No access
5 The Argument from BrainDamage Vindicated No access
6 No Mental Life after Brain Death No access
7 The Neural Substrate of Emotions and Emotional Processing No access
8 Brain, Language, andSurvival after Death No access
9 The Brain that Doesn’t Know Itself No access
10 The Dualist’s Dilemma No access
11 Why Survival is Metaphysically Impossible No access
12 Conceptual Problems Confronting a Totally Disembodied Afterlife No access
13 What Could Pair a Nonphysical Soul to a Physical Body? No access
14 Nonphysical Souls Would Violate Physical Laws No access
15 There is No Trace of Any SoulLinked to the Body No access
16 Since Physical Formulas are not Violated, No Soul Controls the Body No access
17 The Implausibility of Astral Bodies and Astral Worlds No access
18 The Pluralizability Objection to a New-Body Afterlife No access
19 Life After Death and theDevastation of the Grave No access
20 Problems with Heaven No access
21 Can God Condemn One to an Afterlife in Hell? No access
22 Objections to Karma and Rebirth No access
23 Giving Up the Ghost to Psychology No access
24 Out-of-Body Experiences are not Evidence for Survival No access
25 Near-Death Experiences are Hallucinations No access
26 A Critique of Ian Stevenson’sRebirth Research No access
27 Is There Adequate Empirical Evidence for Reincarnation? No access
28 Conjecturing Up Spirits in the Improvisations of Mediums No access
