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Title The myth of an afterlife : the case against life after death / edited by Michael Martin and Keith Augustine
Published Lanham : Rowman and Littlefield, [2015]

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Description 1 online resource (xxxi, 675 pages)
Contents Foreword: on the origin of afterlife beliefs by means of memetic selection / Steve Stewart-Williams -- Introduction / Keith Augustine -- Part I: Empirical arguments for annihilation -- Dead as a doornail: souls, brains, and survival / Matt McCormick -- Explaining personality: soul theory versus behavior genetics / Jean Mercer -- Dissolution into death: the mind's last symptoms indicate annihilation / Davis Weisman -- The argument from brain damage vindicated / Rocco J. Gennaro and Yonatan I. Fishman -- No mental life after brain death: the argument from neural localization of mental functions / Gualtiero Piccinini and Sonya Bahar -- The neural substrate of emotions and emotional processing / Carlos J. Álvarez -- Brain, language, and survival after death / Terence Hines -- The brain that doesn't know itself: persons oblivious to their neurological deficits / Jamie Horder -- The dualist's dilemma: the high cost of reconciling neuroscience with a soul / Keith Augustine and Yonatan I. Fishman -- Part II: Conceptual and empirical difficulties for survival -- Why survival is metaphysically impossible / Raymond D. Bradley -- Conceptual problems confronting a totally disembodied afterlife / Theodore M. Drange -- What could pair nonphysical soul to a physical body? / Jaegwon Kim -- Nonphysical souls would violate physical laws / David L. Wilson -- These is no trace of any soul linked to the body / Daniel Papineau -- Since physical formulas are not violated, no soul controls the body / Leonard Angel -- The implausibility of astral bodies and astral worlds / Susan Blackmore -- The pluralizability objection to a new-body afterlife / Theodore M. Drange -- Life after death and the devastation of the grave / Eric T. Olson -- Part III: Problematic models of the afterlife -- Problems with heaven / Michael Martin -- Can God condemn one to an afterlife in hell? / Raymond D. Bradley -- Objections to karma and rebirth: an introduction / Ingrid Hansen Smythe -- Part IV: Dubious evidence for survival -- giving up the ghost to psychology / Rense Lange and James Houran -- Out-of-body experiences are not evidence for survival / Susan Blackmore -- Near-death experiences are hallucinations / Keith Augustine -- A critique of Ian Stevenson's rebirth research / Champe Ransom -- Is there adequate empirical evidence for reincarnation?: an analysis of Ian Stevenson's work / Leonard Angel -- Conjecturing up spirits in the improvisations of mediums / Claus Flodin Larsen -- Madness in the method: fatal flaws in recent mediumship experiments / Christian Battista, Nicolas Gauvrit, and Etienne LeBel -- Is there life after death?: a review of the supporting evidence / David Lester
Summary "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."-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed
Subject Future life.
BODY, MIND & SPIRIT -- Reincarnation.
Future life
Tod
Jenseits
Jenseitsglaube
Form Electronic book
Author Martin, Michael, 1932-2015, editor.
Augustine, Keith, 1976- editor.
LC no. 2021676448
ISBN 9780810886780
0810886782