Abstract
Jan Patočka opens “The Phenomenology of Afterlife” by indicating that philosophers always tend to focus on questions about the mortality or immortality of the soul when thinking about death, and that he wants to take a different route focusing instead on the phenomenology of the afterlife and the ways the diseased others live in us. And this is what the major bulk of the text focuses on. But as Patočka’s unfinished text is about to end, he leaves us with a peculiar addendum that signals that a return to the more traditional questions – about death as mine – is necessary. In this text, I seek to elucidate what the phenomenology of afterlife brings to the traditional discussion about death as mine (and about my “soul”). One of the more prominent and well-developed modern theories that discuss death as mine is Derek Parfit’s. Thus, the effort in this text is to find out what Patočka’s phenomenology can teach us about Parfit’s theory.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation.
- 2.
This is one of the major merits of (Ruin 2019).
References
Bergman, Ingmar (Director). 1957. Det sjunde inseglet. Svensk filmindustri.
Forsberg, Niklas. 2022. Lectures on a philosophy less ordinary: Language and morality in J. L. Austin’s philosophy. New York: Routledge.
Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Being and time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Husserl, Edmund. 1990. Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: Second book, studies in the phenomenology of constitution. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. The Hague: Nijhoff.
Larkin, Philip. 2013. In The complete poems, ed. Archie Burnett. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The visible and the invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Murdoch, Iris. 2003. Metaphysics as a guide to morals. London: Vintage Classics.
Parfit, Derek. 1971. Personal identity. The Philosophical Review 80 (1): 3–27.
———. 1984. Reasons and persons. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1995. The unimportance of identity. In Identity, ed. Henry Harris, 13–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ruin, Hans. 2019. Being with the dead: Burial, ancestral politics, and the roots of historical consciousness. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Forsberg, N. (2024). “Unresting Death, a Whole Day Nearer Now”: Parfit and Patočka on Death and False Consolations. In: Strandberg, G., Strandberg, H. (eds) Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 128. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-49547-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-49548-9
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)