Scheffler, S. (2013). Death and the Afterlife. Ed. N. Kolodny. New York: Oxford University Press. With commentaries by S. Wolf, H. G. Frankfurt, S. Shiffrin and N. Kolodny.
Not read. The summary is drawn from the abstract or from what the work is standardly cited for. A reading should check it first.
Why this is here
The strongest case the record holds against the owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491) in the dimension of time: concern for people after one’s death, with no benefit to oneself, which the thesis would have to count as self-interest on a self extended past death. For QUESTION-301.
Read in its place
The work cannot be read here, so the record holds it at second hand.
The 2012 Tanner Lectures (NOTE-1298) are the source of the book’s first two chapters, “The Afterlife (Part I)” and “(Part II)” (pp. 14–82 per Crossref), read here in the text the Tanner site serves. They give the doomsday and infertility scenarios, the afterlife conjecture, the three dependency theses, the limits of egoism and of individualism, and Scheffler’s own reading of all this as dependence on future people, not altruism toward them. The LIT summary says future people’s existence “does nothing for us”; the lectures say it keeps our valuing secure. Missing still: the book’s text as revised, the third essay (“Fear, Death, and Confidence”, pp. 83–110), the volume’s introduction (pp. 2–12), the commentaries of Wolf, Frankfurt, Shiffrin and Kolodny, and the replies. Cottingham’s review (NOTE-1306) reports a little of each.
Cottingham’s review (NOTE-1306) adds what the Tanner text lacks. It gives the third lecture’s thesis: a life must be temporally bounded, so personal immortality is no remedy, yet confidence in our values needs others to live on (book pp. 100–109). It gives Frankfurt’s Darwinian doubt that the concern is altruistic (p. 138), and Wolf’s case that facing extinction we could and should go on valuing (pp. 127–128). Missing still: the book’s own text, Shiffrin’s and Kolodny’s commentaries, Scheffler’s replies, and the argument of the third lecture beyond its conclusions. The review’s “more altruistic construal” should not be taken over: the lectures deny that the result is altruism.