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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