Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-17T03:59:11.446Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Intimations of immortality’: a response to Bernard Williams

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2018

JON W. THOMPSON
JON W. THOMPSON*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, King's College London, London WC2R, UK
*
e-mail: jon.thompson@kcl.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article, I address Bernard Williams's famous objection to immortality. Following others, I conceive of Williams's argument as presenting a dilemma for those who hope in immortality. The first lemma involves utter boredom, while the second lemma involves loss of one's distinctive character. I argue that each lemma fails to admit realistic alternative possibilities. The first fails to admit the possibility that our disposition to boredom is a radically contingent disposition. The second fails to admit the possibility that we retain some of our most important desires and projects in immortality – even while cycling through an array of desires and projects.

Type
Articles from the 2018 Postgraduate Essay Prize
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 245 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Borges, Jorge Luis (1964) ‘The immortal’, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (London: Penguin), 135–149.Google Scholar
Bortolotti, Lisa & Nagasawa, Yujin (2009) ‘Immortality without boredom’, Ratio, 22, 261–277.Google Scholar
Bruckner, Donald (2012) ‘Against the tedium of immortality’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 20, 623–644.Google Scholar
Chappell, Timothy (2009) ‘Infinity goes up on trial: must eternal life be boring?’, The European Journal of Philosophy, 70, 30–44.Google Scholar
Edwards, Jonathan (1996) ‘The miscellanies’, in Schaefer, Thomas (ed.) Works of Jonathan Edwards, XIII: The ‘Miscellanies’: Entry Nos. a-z, aa-zz, 1–500 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), <http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4xMjo0LndqZW8> [accessed 20 April 2018].+[accessed+20+April+2018].>Google Scholar
Endo, Shusaku (1980) Silence (Tokyo: Monumenta Nipponica).Google Scholar
Frankfurt, Harry G. (1971) ‘Freedom of the will and the concept of a person’, Journal of Philosophy, 68, 5–20.Google Scholar
Matheson, Benjamin (2017) ‘Practical identity’, in Matheson, Benjamin and Nagasawa, Yujin (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 391–411.Google Scholar
Merricks, Trenton (2008) ‘The resurrection of the body’, in Flint, Thomas P. & Rea, Michael C. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 476–490.Google Scholar
Moore, A. W. (2006) ‘Williams, Nietzsche, and the meaninglessness of immortality’, Mind, 115, 311–330.Google Scholar
Locke, John (1975) An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Nidditch, Peter H. (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 328–348.Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Brian (2011) ‘The problem of heaven’, Ratio, 24, 46–64.Google Scholar
Scheffler, Samuel (2013) Death and the Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Taliaferro, Charles (1990) ‘Why we need immortality’, Modern Theology, 6, 367–377.Google Scholar
van Inwagen, Peter (1978) ‘The possibility of resurrection’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 9, 114–121.Google Scholar
Weatherhead, Leslie D. (1937) The After-World of the Poets: The Contribution of the Victorian Poets to the Development of the Idea of Immortality (London: The Epworth Press).Google Scholar
Williams, Bernard (1973) ‘The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality’, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 82–100.Google Scholar
Wisnewski, Jeremy (2005) ‘Is the immortal life worth living?’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 58, 27–36.Google Scholar
Wordsworth, William (2005) ‘Ode: intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood’, in Heaney, Seamus (ed.) William Wordsworth: Poems selected by Seamus Heaney (London: Faber and Faber), 99–105.Google Scholar