Philosophy Commons^™

Divinity, Dereck Daschke

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Divinity (2023), directed by Eddie Alcazar.

Immortality Through Mind Uploading And Resurrection, Adam M. Leis

Masters Theses

Technology in the last century has flourished exponentially. Previous fantasies are becoming cutting-edge discoveries like global communications, encyclopedic knowledge at the average person’s fingertips, and even medical advances used to improve and extend one’s quality of life and life expectancy. As technology pushes the boundaries of what is possible, ambitious visionaries look to solve the arguably greatest problem known to humanity: death. Transhumanists aiming to use technology to overcome this great human limitation, mortality, present the newest proposed solutions to life’s oldest challenge. One of these solutions, mind uploading, is perhaps the most ambitious, but it is not without its …

John Toland’S Pivotal Version Of Secularism At The Turn Of The Eighteenth Century, Edward Jayne

English Faculty Publications

John Toland’s Pivotal Version of Secularism at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

John Toland (1669-1728) sustained a life-long confrontation with Christianity as well as with religion and orthodox belief in general. His unprecedented advance from Irish Catholicism to secularism and finally outright atheism played a central role in European philosophy despite its having been all but forgotten in later times. He left Ireland to attend Edinburgh University in Scotland followed by Leyden University in the Netherlands and finally a faculty position at Oxford University preceding his career as an independent author. By his early death he had published as …

Adaptation, Steven Luper

Philosophy Faculty Research

Some ways of dealing with a threatened evil will be self-defeating, in the sense that the response is no better for us, or even worse, than the evil it prevents. A way of adapting to death might be self-defeating in precisely the same way. Perhaps, however, we can adapt to death by suitably modifying our interests, and do so in a way that is not self-defeating. I will call this claim the adaptation thesis. Elsewhere, I have argued against it. In this chapter, I reinforce that conclusion.

Immortal Curiosity, Attila Tanyi, Karl Karlander

Attila Tanyi

The paper discusses Bernard Williams’ argument that immortality is rationally undesirable because it leads to insufferable boredom. We first spell out Williams’ argument in the form of a dilemma. We then show that the first horn of this dilemma, namely Williams’ requirement of the constancy of character of the immortal, is defensible. We next argue against a recent attempt that accepts the dilemma, but rejects the conclusion Williams draws from it. From these we conclude that blocking the second horn of the dilemma is the best way to respond to Williams. Our objection contends that Williams overlooks a basic feature …

The Tragedy Of Death In The Pursuit Of Spiritual Immortality, And The Physician’S Response, Rachel Furman

Senior Honors Projects

Life is a tragedy in the sense that it amounts to one single contradiction: man will die, and knows this, yet he still does not want to die. He thus spends his entire life fighting the battle to survive, though he knows that victory is impossible. That is, victory in the sense of corporeal immortality is impossible – but what happens to the soul? That human soul, which we have come to distinguish from the body by placing it above the temporal world, and equating it with eternity. Belief in immortality, in this case, spiritual immortality, is, according to Miguel …

Annihilation, Steven Luper

Philosophy Faculty Research

Let us assume with Epicurus that death means annihilation. Then can we truthfully say that death is nothing to us? I think not. Nor should we want to believe that the deaths we shall soon face are nothing to us, I shall argue. Once we see what we would have to be like in order to be truly as unconcerned about dying as Epicurus professed to be, we shall see that we are better off dreading our dying day. However, I shall suggest that there are steps we can take to ensure that if luck is on our side, dying …