The Logic of Mortality

Proceeding from the truism that all men are mortal, philosophers have employed various strategies to suggest that all men are also immortal. In this book these strategies are categorized as: the "Way of the Astral Body", the "Platonic-Cartesian Way" and the "Reconstitutionist Way". By examining and questioning the assumptions on which these theories are based, the author presents an analysis of human mortality and identity. He also examines other bodies of knowledge which bear on the question, such as parapsychology, and argues that the history of discussion about non-corporeal identity has been the history of negative definition and that people are only able to describe what such a state is not.