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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Does anyone ever survive his or her bodily death ? Could anyone? No speculative questions are older than these, or have been answered more frequently or more variously. None have been laid to rest more often, or — in our times — with more claimed decisiveness. Jay Rosenberg, for instance, no doubt speaks for many contemporary philosophers when he claims, in his recent book, to have ‘demonstrated’ that ‘ we cannot [even] make coherent sense of the supposed possibility that a person's history might continue beyond that person's [bodily] death’.
1 Thinking Clearly About Death (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1983), p. 96, emphasis added.Google Scholar
2 See especially Parfit, Derek, ‘Personal Identity’, The Philosophical Review, LXXX (1971), 3–27, andCrossRefGoogle Scholar his Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), part in;Google ScholarShoemaker, Sydney, ‘Persons and Their Pasts’, American Philosophical Quarterly, vii (1970), 269–85, andGoogle Scholar his ‘Personal Identity. A Materialist Account’ in Shoemaker, Sydney and Swinburne, Richard, Personal Identity (Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 69–152;Google Scholar and Nozick, Robert, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), ch. 1.Google ScholarStevenson's, early investigations are summarized in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1966; 2nd edn, 1974), but he has since (with associates) published additional data in four thick volumes - Cases of the Reincarnation Type: vol. 1 (1975) vol. 2 (1977); vol. 3 (1980); vol. 4 (1983) - as well as in his Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy (1984), and Children Who Remember Previous Lives (1987), all of which were published by The University Press of Virginia. Children Who Remember contains a bibliography of Stevenson's many additional articles on cases suggestive of reincarnation, including ones inGoogle ScholarInternational Journal of Comparative Sociology (1970)Google Scholar, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (1983)Google Scholarand American Journal of Psychiatry (1979).Google Scholar
3 Wiggins, David, Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), p. 50.Google Scholar
4 The Presumption of Atheism (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 104;Google Scholar Flew repeats this dismissive move, in almost the same words, in his Gifford Lectures, published as The Logic of Mortality (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 2–3.Google Scholar
5 See my, ‘Identity, Transformation, and What Matters in Survival’, in Kolak, Daniel and Martin, Raymond, eds., Self and Identity (New York: Macmillan 1991), pp. 289–301.Google Scholar
6 For a sample of the literature on commissurotomy, see Kolak and Martin, Ibid.
7 Shoemaker, , ‘Personal Identity: A Materialist Account’, op. cit. p. 119.Google Scholar
8 Lewis, David has questioned whether fission undermines identity by arguing for a multiple occupancy view of persons, in ‘Survival and Identity’, in Rorty, Amelié, ed., The Identities of persons (Berkely: University of california Press, 1976)Google Scholar, reprinted, along with ‘Postscripts’ in Philosophical Papers, vol. I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) and in Kolak and Martin, op. cit.Google ScholarPerry, John has questioned the transitivity of identity in ‘Can the Self Divide? Journal of Philosophy, LXIX (1972), 463–88. I have argued that, so far as the importance of identity is concerned, not much depends on whether identity is lost in fission, in ‘Identity, Transformation, and What Matters in Survival’, op. cit.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 The Jasbir case is described in Stevenson's, Twenty Cases, op. cit. and also in his Children Who Remember, op. cit.Google Scholar
10 Interestingly, philosophers sometimes argue on a priori grounds, apparently without considering the empirical evidence to the contrary from the psychological study of dissociation, that the blending of memories from different psychologies is impossible. See, for instance, Wollheim, Richard, The Thread of Life (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984.), pp. 112ffGoogle Scholar (to which I have responded in ‘Memory, Connecting, and What Matters in Survival’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, xxiv (1987), 82–97) andGoogle ScholarSchechtman, Marya, ‘Personhood and Personal Identity’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXXVII (1990), 71–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 In addition to the references in note 2, see Stevenson's, ‘Three New Cases of the Reincarnation Type in Sri Lanka With Written Records Made Before Verifications’, summarized in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, CLXXVI (1988), 741, andCrossRefGoogle Scholar presented fully in Journal of Scientific Exploration, II (1988), 217–38.Google Scholar
12 Criticism of Stevenson may be found in Wilson, Ian, Mind Out of Time (Victor Gollancz, 1981), pp. 58–60;Google ScholarRoll, William G., ‘The Changing Perspectives on Life after Death’, in Krippner, Stanley, ed., Advances in Parapsychological Research (New York, 1982), vol. 3;Google ScholarChari, C. T. K., ‘Reincarnation Research: Method and Interpretation’, in Ebon, M., ed., Signet Handbook of Parapsychology (New York: New American Library, 1978);Google Scholar and Edwards, Paul, ‘The Case Against Reincarnation’, a four-part article in Free Inquiry, vols. 6–7, (1986–1977).Google Scholar
13 See, for instance, Patterson, A. S. Pringle, The Idea of Immortality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), p. 107Google Scholar, and Gauld, Alan, Mediumship and Survival (London: Heinemann, 1982), pp. 172–87.Google Scholar
14 Children Who Remember, op. cit. p. 147.
15 Twenty Cases, 2nd edn, op. cit. p. 333. See also Stevenson's, discussion of fraud in Cases, vol. 3, op. cit. pp. 343–345.Google Scholar
16 Children Who Remember, op. cit. pp. 150–1.
17 Ibid. p. 152.
18 Ibid. p. 153.
19 Gauld, op. cit. p. 185.Google Scholar
20 Ibid. p. 131.
21 Ibid. p. 136.
22 This sort of example is discussed by Parfit, , Reasons and Persons, op. cit. pp. 199–200, and by Nozick, op. cit. p. 41.Google Scholar
23 I am grateful to several people who offered criticisms and suggestions when I talked on the topic of reincarnation at the University of New Mexico, in March, 1991, and also to John Barresi and Ian Stevenson for written comments on an earlier version of this paper.Google Scholar