From the publisher: “This volume brings together renowned experts in the philosophy of religion, Graham Oppy, David Apolloni, Shyam Ranganathan, Joshua Farris and Steven B. Cowan, to present four key starting points in the life after death debate.”
Steven Cown gets credit for bringing us together. This isn’t a mere anthology or collection of separate essays. Each one of us wrote a main contribution outlining our view on the topic of whether there is life after death. And then each of us responded to each other’s views, and then we had one last chance to respond to the criticisms.
In my contribution I argue that persons are moral abstractions from the empirical aspects of their life (such as their body, mind, senses and intellectual functions) that are not reducible to such states but are responsible for such states. As agents so understood are normative and not necessarily descriptively factual, they survive continual states of death and change. Life after death is, on this account, an ordinary state of affairs, which entails responsibility for a dead past we inherit and a future of our making which we will inherit as we inherit our past now.
One of the implications of this position is that we can continue to have relationships with people after they have passed.
