Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Summary₁

1. In "How to Live Forever without Saving Your Soul" Trenton Merricks responds to worries about how a wholly and purely physical person, a human animal², who utterly ceased to exist could possibly come back into existence at a later date. After criticizing the two most familiar responses,
   • the reassembly of material parts response, and
   • the personal identity grounded in psychological continuity³ response,
   Merricks develops his own bold response. Merricks believes that objections to the possibility of survival by way of resurrection rely either:-
   • on the assumption that there are criteria of personal identity over time which rule out the possibility of temporal gaps in a person's existence, or
   • on the notion that temporal gaps of the sort required for resurrection are just impossible.
2. As to the latter, it has seemed self-evident to some philosophers that identity supposes continuous, uninterrupted existence. Gaps in the existence of a thing would entail that a thing can exist before it begins to exist, which is absurd. But Merricks makes a plea for metaphysical modesty when it comes to the fruits of modal⁴ intuition. He thus dismisses claims of the form "temporal gaps of the sort implied by resurrection are simply impossible" as the product of an overweening confidence in one's modal⁵ intuition. Modesty is more becoming.
3. As for the former assumption, building on his previous work on criteria of identity⁶ over time, Merricks claims that there are no criteria of personal identity over time. So all criterion-based worries and arguments against the possibility of resurrection dissipate. In the end Merricks offers reasons of his own for believing in the possibility of resurrection for wholly physical persons, frankly admitting that if resurrection occurs, it's going to take a miracle.