Burley, M (2015) "The End of Immortality!" Eternal Life and the Makropulos Debate. Journal of Ethics, 19 (3). pp. 305-321. ISSN 1382-4554
Abstract
Responding to a well-known essay by Bernard Williams, philosophers (and a few theologians) have engaged in what I call “the Makropulos debate,” a debate over whether immortality—“living forever”—would be desirable for beings like us. Lacking a firm conceptual grounding in the religious contexts from which terms such as “immortality” and “eternal life” gain much of their sense, the debate has consisted chiefly in a battle of speculative fantasies. Having presented my four main reasons for this assessment, I examine an alternative and neglected conception, the idea of eternal life as a present possession, derived in large part from Johannine Christianity. Without claiming to argue for the truth of this conception, I present its investigation as exemplifying a conceptually fruitful direction of inquiry into immortality or eternal life, one which takes seriously the religious and ethical surroundings of these concepts.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2015. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com |
Keywords: | Eternal life; Immortality; Makropulos Case; Christian theology |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science (Leeds) > Theology and Religious Studies (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number John Templeton Foundation - DO NOT USE S-000672 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 24 Nov 2015 11:35 |
Last Modified: | 12 Feb 2019 13:31 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10892-015-9205-6 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s10892-015-9205-6 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:92191 |