Philosopher Mark Johnston asks, 'Is this our only life?'

When Princeton University Professor Mark Johnston's daughter was 18 months old, she stood on a beach with what he describes as a "quizzical philosophical look on her face, as if she was thinking, 'Is this my only life?'"

That question is the heart of Johnston’s talk at UC Berkeley this past March, where he revisits a topic he wrote about two decades ago. Back then, he believed that the hope for an afterlife was impossible. But now, he has changed his mind. 

"Today, I want to show why I was wrong," says Johnston, author of the 2010 book Surviving Death. "That decent and comprehensible hope is not dashed by such ontological considerations. Even if we are essentially embodied somehow or other, our present embodiments may not be our only embodiments.”

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Johnston explores through a secular lens how near-death experiences fail to provide decisive proof of a detached soul, how reductive materialism — the view that everything about the mind can ultimately be explained in physical terms — creates absurd ethical contradictions, and how viewing ourselves as "embodied wills" leaves open the possibility of a life to come.

This talk took place on March 11, and was part of the Foerster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul sponsored by Berkeley Graduate Lectures. 

Watch a video of the lecture.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by by HoliznaCC0.

Photo by Frank van Hulst via Unsplash. [Image of a person in a patterned sweater sits looking out at the ocean during sunset]

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