Is it conceivable that you might survive the death of your body?

Résumé du document

If somebody thinks thoroughly about life, he will naturally come across the thought of death. We see death as a natural consequence of life. Everyone is not agreeing on the meaning of death though. Some see it as the end of everything, a total annihilation; others see it as the start of a new phase. Each individual has his own way of dealing with death that corresponds to its religious (or absence of) beliefs. In this essay, I will try to answer: ‘Is it conceivable that you might survive the death of your body?' That question asks us if “you” could still be “you” without your body or at least without your initial body. To answer that question, we must determine what that “you” is made of. Do you need to have the same body to be able to claim that you are the same person or would a certain set of memories be enough? I will use some examples to show the difficulty in identifying what is the constituent part of a person and then I will see how that can be translated in after death experiences. In everyday life we tend to identify people according to their outward look. If a person looks very much alike another person that we saw some time before, we are just going to assume that it is the same person. However, that is only true when we know that there are no factors that could mislead us that as the person having an identical twin. But then, if the two images that the person reflects are not totally the same, we might not say for that reason that it is not the same person.

Extraits

[...] It is a drawback of the theory that to Terence Penelhum, Survival and Disembodied Existence, London : Routledge & K. Paul New York : Humanities P chapter p. 19-36. Although Penelhum does later on reject the possibility of a disembodied person because of the lack of body continuity. P.T. Geach, Could Sensuous Experiences Occur Apart From An Organism', in Anthony Flew (ed.) Body, Mind and Death. New York : Macmillan London : Collier-Macmillan p. 265-269. Terence Penelhum, Survival and Disembodied Existence, London : Routledge & K. [...]

[...] T., "Personal Identity", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2002/entries/identity-personal/ Penelhum, T., Survival and Disembodied Existence, London : Routledge & K. Paul New York : Humanities P Shoemaker, S. and Swinburne, R., Personal identity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Williams, B., Problems of the Self, Philosophical Papers 1956-1972, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press will only address the philosophical questions related to it and not the practical or religious ones. Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburn, Personal identity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell p.48. [...]

[...] Is it conceivable that you might survive the death of your body? If somebody thinks thoroughly about life, he will naturally come across the thought of death. We see death as a natural consequence of life. Everyone is not agreeing on the meaning of death though. Some see it as the end of everything, a total annihilation; others see it as the start of a new phase. Each individual has his own way of dealing with death that corresponds to its religious (or absence of) beliefs. [...]

[...] Bibliography Davies, Brian. An introduction to the philosophy of religion. 3rd ed. Oxford University press, New York chapter 13, p. 289-318. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford [Oxfordshire] : Clarendon Press chapter 10-11, p. 199-243. Ducasse, C. J., The Belief in a Life After Death, 2nd ed., Springfield: Charles C. Thomas Publisher Flew, A. (ed.) Body, Mind and Death. New York : Macmillan London : Collier-Macmillan Hick, J., Faith and Knowledge, Basingstoke : Macmillan Press Olson, E. [...]

[...] Therefore a substance dualist might argue that if somebody dies, then that person can survive, either in another body or in a disembodied form. The two versions of that survival are linked because it is hard to imagine the soul of the person being into a new body without that there was at least a fraction of time where the soul was in a disembodied form. Therefore, I will now turn to see if it is a possibility that one might be considered as a person even if it is disembodied. [...]