What Can Philosophy Tell Us About Life after Death? | Prof. Mark Spencer
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2018
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
This lecture was offered at NYU on November 10th, 2018. For more information about upcoming TI events, visit: thomisticinstitute.org/events-1/
The hand out for this lecture is available at: tinyurl.com/ycx2596r
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So I want to speak an answer to this question of what philosophy can tell us about life after death |
| 0:04.9 | by working through 10 things that I think philosophy can tell us about human immortality. |
| 0:11.6 | Now, my remarks today are going to be strictly philosophical. |
| 0:15.0 | That is, they rely only on what can be known, on the basis of natural experience, |
| 0:19.9 | that any reasonable human person can have. |
| 0:23.3 | And I'm going to make no claims that rely on the truth of divine revelation or theology. |
| 0:29.7 | I am going to consider whether some such claims cohere with those truths that can be known |
| 0:35.2 | by human reason. And my goal today is not to prove my conclusions, these ten things, beyond all reasonable doubt. |
| 0:42.3 | When I say that philosophy can tell us some things about life after death, |
| 0:47.3 | what I'm saying is that philosophy can draw conclusions about life after death, |
| 0:52.3 | which it's reasonable to hold given certain experiences and certain ways of reasoning about them. |
| 0:58.0 | I think probably all 10 of these conclusions are controversial, and there's a lot more that could be said about all of them. |
| 1:03.0 | I'm probably not going to give an adequate argument for any of them, so I look forward to discussing them all with you during the Q&A. |
| 1:10.0 | So the first thing philosophy can tell us about life after death, is how we can go about inquiring into this issue. |
| 1:16.6 | So obviously life after death is not available for direct empirical investigation, as father said. |
| 1:23.6 | And I'm not going to say anything about so-called near-death experiences, since there's |
| 1:29.4 | too much uncertainty, I think, about what's actually going on there. And besides, those |
| 1:33.7 | experiences are not available to everyone. Philosophy needs to begin its inquiry, I think, |
| 1:39.1 | with current experience, an experience that's available to anybody. So what we need to do, if we're going |
| 1:46.3 | to inquire into life after death, is consider whether we have any current experiences that |
| 1:52.8 | transcend or occur outside of our bodies such that they could continue after death. |
| 2:00.3 | Now, a fundamental principle for inquiring into life after death philosophically |
... |
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