Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 708
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9⅜
978-0-8108-8677-3 • Hardback • March 2015 • $121.00 • (£93.00) - Currently out of stock. Copies will arrive soon.
978-0-8108-8678-0 • eBook • March 2015 • $115.00 • (£88.00)
Michael Martin is professor of philosophy emeritus at Boston University. In addition to more than 150 articles and reviews, he is the author or editor of several books, including The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Atheism, Morality, and Meaning, and Atheism: A Philosophical Justification.
Keith Augustine is executive director and scholarly paper editor of Internet Infidels (infidels.org), which hosts the popular SecularWeb. He is well known as a skeptic on the question of survival after death. He has published in Skeptic magazine and his work has been the object of discussion in multiple issues of the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
Foreword by Steve Stewart-Williams
Preface
1. Introduction
Keith Augustine
PART 1 EMPIRICAL ARGUMENTS FOR ANNIHILATION
Introduction to Part 1
2. Dead as a Doornail: Souls, Brains, and Survival
Matt McCormick
3. Explaining Personality: Soul Theory versus Behavior Genetics
Jean Mercer
4. Dissolution into Death: The Mind’s Last Symptoms Indicate Annihilation
David Weisman
5. The Argument from Brain Damage Vindicated
Rocco J. Gennaro and Yonatan I. Fishman
6. No Mental Life after Brain Death: The Argument from the Neural Localization of Mental Functions
Gualtiero Piccinini and Sonya Bahar
7. The Neural Substrate of Emotions and Emotional Processing
Carlos J. Álvarez
8. Brain, Language, and Survival after Death
Terence Hines
9. The Brain that Doesn’t Know Itself: Persons Oblivious to their Neurological Deficits
Jamie Horder
10. The Dualist’s Dilemma: The High Cost of Reconciling Neuroscience with a Soul
Keith Augustine and Yonatan I. Fishman
PART 2 CONCEPTUAL & EMPIRICAL DIFFICULTIES FOR SURVIVAL
Introduction to Part 2
11. Why Survival is Metaphysically Impossible
Raymond D. Bradley
12. Conceptual Problems Confronting a Totally Disembodied Afterlife
Theodore M. Drange
13. What Could Pair a Nonphysical Soul to a Physical Body?
Jaegwon Kim
14. Nonphysical Souls Would Violate Physical Laws
David L. Wilson
15. There is No Trace of Any Soul Linked to the Body
David Papineau
16. Since Physical Formulas are Not Violated, No Soul Controls the Body
Leonard Angel
17. The Implausibility of Astral Bodies and Astral Worlds
Susan Blackmore
18. The Pluralizability Objection to a New-Body Afterlife
Theodore M. Drange
19. Life After Death and the Devastation of the Grave
Eric T. Olson
PART 3 PROBLEMATIC MODELS OF THE AFTERLIFE
Introduction to Part 3
20. Problems with Heaven
Michael Martin
21. Can God Condemn One to an Afterlife in Hell?
Raymond D. Bradley
22. Objections to Karma and Rebirth: An Introduction
Ingrid Hansen Smythe
PART 4 DUBIOUS EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL
Introduction to Part 4
23. Giving Up the Ghost to Psychology
Rense Lange and James Houran
24. Out-of-Body Experiences are not Evidence for Survival
Susan Blackmore
25. Near-Death Experiences are Hallucinations
Keith Augustine
26. A Critique of Ian Stevenson’s Rebirth Research
Champe Ransom
27. Is There Adequate Empirical Evidence for Reincarnation? An Analysis of Ian Stevenson’s Work
Leonard Angel
28. Conjecturing Up Spirits in the Improvisations of Mediums
Claus Flodin Larsen
29. Madness in the Method: Fatal Flaws in Recent Mediumship Experiments
Christian Battista, Nicolas Gauvrit, and Etienne LeBel
30. Is There Life After Death? A Review of the Supporting Evidence
David Lester
Index
About the Contributors
This is a hugely needed book. It addresses profound questions that are too seldom answered from a naturalistic point of view and answers them authoritatively yet surprisingly accessibly. In view of its scope and comprehensiveness - and especially because critical books on the afterlife have been so rare - the release of The Myth of an Afterlife is a noteworthy publishing event.
— Free Inquiry
The book is impressively clear, thorough and detailed. It is also forcefully argued. . . .[T]his is an important book, and can be read with profit by believers, if only to remind themselves how formidable the arguments against survival of consciousness can seem to be. It will reinforce the atheistic convictions of its natural audience, and will doubtless encourage young Americans, especially, to disregard the God-talk they hear spouted all around them.
— Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
Martin and Augustine deserve credit for assembling this wide-ranging group of papers in opposition to belief in an afterlife. For those who agree with them, the collection offers a virtual armory of ready-made weapons. For others, it comprises an impressive assemblage of obstacles that must be overcome or circumvented.
— Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Ultimately, the value of The Myth of an Afterlife lies in its comprehensiveness. It recognizes that '…a volume that focuses on arguments against an afterlife is essential for revealing the full force of the case against life after death,' and in this capacity, it delivers. For the novice, it serves as an advanced but approachable introduction to the facets and literature of the survivalist-mortalist debate across a wide variety of disciplines, with especially helpful introductions and overviews provided by the editors. For the more advanced scholar, it serves as a reference work, providing convenient summaries and surveys of the literature and studies in addition to the proffered arguments. Lastly, for any intellectually honest survivalist, it is a catalog of the myriad challenges against his or her view that must be neutralized in order to render the view defensible.
— Metapsychology Online
[P]hilosophers Keith Augustine and the late Michael Martin took it upon themselves to assemble a team of 29 valiant contributors to attack the afterlife ‘myth.’ The result is an impressive volume composed of 30 essays, spanning 675 pages and organized in 4 parts…. The Myth of an Afterlife, rather, stays focused on its main mission of dismantling the survival hypothesis, regardless of why humans tend to accept it. Its rigor, relentless argumentation, and careful attention to the evidence and possible objections make it a major and unique contribution to a topic long neglected by scientists. Its main virtue, in fact, is simply to take the idea of the afterlife and its consequences seriously, and see where this leads. Given the current success of neuroscience in establishing the neural basis of consciousness and thought, is it still honest to claim that we simply don’t know ‘what comes after’? If so, then, one might wonder what exactly the cognitive and brain sciences have been discovering and teaching us all along about the nature of the mind.
— Skeptic Magazine
As the editors point out, there are plenty of books arguing the case for an afterlife but few that examine the case against. This collection of thirty articles in over 650 pages does just that…. [The articles] hammer home the conclusion that there is absolutely no evidence from neurology that mental functions have any independence from the physical brain, and indeed such an idea when critically examined makes no sense.
— Magonia Review of Books
The Myth of the Afterlife is a massive tome explicitly making the case against life after death with 30 chapters in four parts: empirical arguments for annihilation, conceptual and empirical difficulties for survival, problematic models of the afterlife, and dubious evidence for survival. . . .[T]he volume…provide[s] readers with a sophisticated analysis of many arguments related to survival.
— Network Review
Understandings from this text, particularly on cognition, could…further the critical examination of thought processes that accompany discourse on mortality.
— Mortality
What all these papers show is how quickly a range of insurmountable problems arise as soon as implications are drawn out from the unconsidered and cosseted beliefs of those devoted to rebirth and survival. As long as people pick and mix their ideas without acknowledging the logical relations between them, they will wallow in delusions. The arguments in this excellent book should sway the open-minded. It is also bulky enough for self-defence.
— The Skeptic (UK)