Philosophical Investigations 30:3 July 2007

ISSN 0190-0536

Philosophy, Death and Immortality

John Haldane, University of St Andrews

I
The death of Dewi Phillips means the loss to philosophy of a distinctive and highly articulate voice; one committed to showing the power
of careful attention to language to reveal the structure of human
thought and practice. Over the period of his career, academic philosophy became increasingly dominated by theoretical modes of
understanding, yet Phillips persisted in the method of cultural phenomenology directed upon word and deed; attending to the particularities of experience and practice, not antecedently presuming to find
systematicity there, or supposing that human meaning and value
require scientific or metaphysical underpinnings. Put another way, to
the extent that metaphysics might be said to be the philosophical
characterisation of the way things are, then Dewi Phillips was a
descriptive metaphysician detailing the reality to be discovered within
human experience.
Given, however, that metaphysics is generally associated with the
project of determining the structure of reality beyond or beneath the
domain of human experience, and of late with a scientifically inspired
model of that project, it risks confusion to describe Phillips philosophy as metaphysical. It might be thought to be equally misleading to
describe it as theological, given that theology has long been associated with similarly transcendentalist aspirations, and also with a style of
abstract theorising that at times has aspired to being another kind of
science. Yet while Phillips was not a theologian in the dogmatic or
systematic sense, and while he had no formal education in theology, his
thought on topics within the field of religion was generally more in
line with modern theologians than with modern philosophers.
An example, relevant to what follows, is the resemblance between
Phillips account of the idea of immortality as that relates to the human
concern for meaning and to the realities of religion, and the views
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advanced at the end of the eighteenth century by Friedrich

Schleiermacher in his addresses in On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural
Despisers. He writes:
If our feeling nowhere attaches itself to the individual, but if its
content is our relation to God wherein all that is individual and
fleeting disappears there can be nothing fleeting in it, but all must be
eternal. In the religious life then we may well say we have already
offered up and disposed of all that is mortal, and that we are actually
enjoying immortality. . . .
[T]he true nature of religion is neither this idea [of God as one
single being outside of the world and behind the world] nor any
other, but immediate consciousness of the Deity as He is found in
ourselves and in the world. Similarly the goal and character of the
religious life is not the immortality that is outside time, behind it or
rather after it, and which still is in time. It is the immortality which
we can have in this temporal life.1

Compare this with Phillips writing two centuries later in Death and
Immortality:
I am suggesting then, that eternal life for the believer is participation
in the life of God, and that this life has to do with dying to the self,
seeing that all things are a gift from God, that nothing is ours by
right or necessity. . . . In learning by contemplation, attention,
renunciation, what forgiving, thanking, loving, etc., mean in these
contexts, the believer is participating in the reality of God; this is
what we mean by Gods reality. . . . The immortality of the soul
refers to the state an individual is in in relation to the unchanging
reality of God.2

Schleiermacher was seeking to save the religious as a domain of

thought and feeling from the attacks of philosophical sceptics, in part
by conceptualising it in terms that detached it from traditional claims
about its metaphysical or historical foundations.This put him at odds
with two sets of critics: those who judged that he failed to meet the
sceptical challenge by retaining problematic religious concepts and
claims; and those who felt that while he might have retained its forms
he had abandoned the substance of religion by giving up reference to
objective non-empirical realities of God, soul and immortality.

1. F. Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers (London: Harper &

Row, 1958) p. 100.
2. D. Z. Phillips, Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970) pp. 5455.
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Phillips was subject to analogous criticisms amounting to the claim

from both sceptics and believers that issues of objective reference were
set aside in favour of human sensibilities and concerns, interpreted as
being wholly immanent. Where traditional disputants sought direct
answers to questions about existents, or about what there is reason
to believe exists or does not exist, Phillips chose to speak instead of
values, commitments and sentiments, seeming to convert talk of God
into talk about purely human matters. It is a moot point who was the
more aggrieved: the atheists who felt that a once clear and stationary
target had been replaced by an obscure and moving one, or the theists
who judged that substance had given way to shadow.
Phillips response to these related criticisms was not just to defend
his philosophical method and his own conclusions, but also to argue
that the critics shared a series of mistaken assumptions about the
character of religious beliefs and practices. More impressively, and for
his opponents more infuriatingly, not only did he not rest content
with arguing that in their rush to theorise, or to construct apologetics for antecedent commitments, they had carelessly assumed that
religious claims must have a certain general character, but he also
recast their preferred terms of philosophical analysis in designs of his
own making.
So that instead of saying that it is a mistake to speak of reference,
objectivity,truth,existence,transcendence, etc., he insisted that
the only way of determining what these could amount to in the
characterisation of religious belief and practice is by looking in detail
at the particularities of the contexts to which his critics insisted on
applying them. So if you are going to discuss the existence of God as
that issue might arise not in the abstract and apart from any foundation
in actual human beliefs, but through engaging critically with those
beliefs, then you need to look in detail at how talk of God and of
Gods existence features there.
Even if there were some academic exercise that might be constructed independently of the fact and form of actual religious belief,
it would be idle to engage in that with the expectation that it should
determine what it would be true or reasonable for believers to say and
think. Religion is as religion does, and religious ideas are as religious
thought and practice determine them to be. No wonder his critics felt
frustrated. Unapologetically, he persisted in discussing religious themes
on his own terms, doing much to show how these reflected the
character of real religious discourse, and also exposing the distortions
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in what hitherto were taken to be obvious and unquestionable interpretations of religious attitudes and utterances.
An example relevant to the present context arises from discussion
by Antony Flew, (criticised by Phillips) of the ways in which it may or
may not make sense to imagine ones own funeral. Having allowed
that it is possible to imagine a scene in which family and friends are
gathered in the presence of a coffin which, in the imagined setting, is
deemed to be ones own, Flew argues that it is nevertheless impossible
to make intelligible the supposition that one could witness ones own
funeral. He writes:
If it really is I who witness it then it is not my funeral but only my
funeral (in inverted commas): and if it really is my funeral than I
cannot be a witness, for I shall be dead and in the coffin.3

In response to the insistence that one can in fact imagine ones own
funeral, Flew replies with an intelligibility challenge: Well, yes, this
seems alright: until someone asks the awkward question Just how does
all this differ from your imagining your own funeral without your
being there at all (except as the corpse in the coffin? While the
rejoinder is directed against a claim about an imaginative possibility, it is
of a sort associated with the idea that the meaning of statements is
closely identified with empirically discriminable situations, and hence
it bears also on the claim that it is possible that one might witness ones
own funeral where that metaphysical possibility is held to be determinable by imagining such a state of affairs.
Phillips grants that the situation which the imagined scene is
deemed to picture is logically contradictory, but he challenges the
assumption that such a piece of imagination should be taken as serving
a representational function, at least in so far as this is interpreted
in speculative, possibility-identifying mode. Instead, writes Phillips,
religious imagery serves religious purposes:
We can look again at Flews question when he asks what is the
difference between imagining oneself witnessing ones funeral and
simply imagining ones funeral. The answer can be found in the
fact that ones presence as observer in the religious picture is an

3. A. Flew, Can a Man Witness His Own Funeral? Hibbert Journal, (195556) p. 246
(quoted by Phillips in Death and Immortality, p. 63).
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expression of how a person can reflect on his life as a whole or how

a person, now, can reflect on events which will occur after his death.4

Phillips argues that Flews demonstration of the incoherence of a

description of witnessing ones funeral, taken to lend support to the
idea that a person could survive the death of his body, is beside the
point inasmuch as it mislocates the role of contemplating ones own
death. Such imaginative fiction does enable one to determine important truths but not ones concerning strange metaphysical possibilities.
Instead, one is able thereby to review aspects of ones mortal life in
light of the only notion of immortality that makes any sense, which is
a spiritual standard of the sort referred to earlier in the passage that
echoed Schleiermacher.
This is interesting and illuminating but it is open to the charge of
having changed the subject, and done so prematurely. A living person
contemplating their mortality by imaginatively conceiving their death
or their being deceased, and doing so for evaluative-cum-spiritual
purposes, is one thing, but it is different from a failed speculative
thought-experiment intended to establish the metaphysical possibility
of surviving death. Phillips switches to the former as if examining the
latter were missing the point; but it is one thing not to attend to a
possibility (in this case the spiritual one) and a distinct thing to miss it
or to confuse it for another.
In fairness, he believes that moving on is warranted. Phillips sides
with those who argue against the metaphysical possibility of life after
death but also thinks that this is irrelevant to the particular religious
beliefs. He writes:
Certainly we have found that if that belief is construed as belief in
the existence of a non-material body, a disembodied spirit, or a
physical body, it seems to be riddled with difficulties and confusions.
For my part, if this were all there is to tell, I should have to conclude
that belief in immortality rests, not only on one mistake, but on a
large number of possible mistakes. . . . [However] I believe that
success or failure in resolving the logical difficulties we have noted
do not have important consequences as far as belief in immortality
is concerned.5

4. Death and Immortality, p. 66.

5. Death and Immortality, pp. 1718.
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Here, however, the argument is not that one possibility having been
excluded another may be followed; rather it is that whether or not the
first (metaphysical interpretation) can be successfully established, or
reasonably defended, is simply besides the point, for only the second
(spiritual interpretation) is relevant. Evidently, someone may wish both
to defend the metaphysical possibility and to argue that it and only
it is what matters for the truth of claims about immortality. More
modestly, one may accept the relevance of a religious hermeneutic of
the sort Phillips wishes to offer, yet add that not only may some version
of the metaphysical position be defensible, but that the possibility of it,
or more strictly belief in that possibility, is connected to the meaning
and value of the proposed religious alternative.

II
My own first introduction to contemporary philosophy of religion
was through reading Death and Immortality and, around the same time,
Peter Geachs God and the Soul.6 Although I did not know it at the
time, both authors were untypical among British analytical philosophers in being interested in and knowledgeable about genuinely
religious matters.The two books also stand in an interesting dialectical
relationship. God and the Soul is a collection of essays published in 1969
as the first book in a series (Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of
Religion) conceived and edited by Phillips following upon the publication with Routledge of his own first book The Concept of Prayer
(1965). Among the subjects it treats are the possibilities of life after
death, materialism and the relationship between moral obligation and
obedience to the will of God. As well as taking particular religious
beliefs and practices very seriously, Geach and Phillips also acknowledged debts to the philosophical methods of Wittgenstein. For Phillips
these were mediated by his teacher Rush Rhees; for Geach they were
acquired directly. Remembering their discussions Geach writes:
One thing I learned from Wittgenstein, in part from the Tractatus but
still more from personal contact, is that philosophical mistakes are
often not refutable falsehoods but confusions; similarly the contrary
insights cannot be conveyed in proper propositions with a truthvalue. . . . Such insights cannot be demonstrated as theses, but only
6. Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).
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conveyed dialectically; the dialectical process largely consists in the

art, whose practice I have perhaps learned in some measure form
Wittgenstein, of reducing to patent nonsense the buried nonsense
that is found in attempts to reject these insights.7

Geach gives instances from philosophical logic, but like Wittgenstein

he deployed the method more widely, as did Phillips. In some cases
they directed it against the same targets; and in Death and Immortality
Phillips picks up Geachs challenges of this sort against a Cartesian
account of the meaning of psychological terms.Yet their understanding of the status of religion was very different; more so than emerges
even in those parts of Death and Immortality where essays from God and
the Soul are under discussion. Put at its simplest Geach is a realist about
religious claims, taking their meaning to be given by truth conditions
that may transcend human recognition; whereas Phillips understands
the meaning and truth of religious discourse in terms of immanent
human concerns.
At the time of first reading my own orientation was (and remains)
realist. I have found in Phillips book, however, an interest that was
then rare and is still uncommon; for by careful attention to forms and
contexts of utterance he brings out the religious, spiritual and moral
sense of these styles of discourse, and there is much one can learn from
his sensitive hermeneutical explorations. Yet whereas he presented
them as alternatives to realist interpretations, I value them as partial
analyses of claims that also purport to be about the way things are
independently of our conceptions and interests. One way of putting
this point is by analogy to the treatment of psychological terms offered
by Geach and adopted by Phillips.
In rejecting the Cartesian account of the psychological as pertaining to a series of logically private mental worlds, each exclusively
inhabited and possessed by an I that corresponds to the mind or soul
of each human person, Geach shows how the sense of psychological
terms is grasped by learning ways of using them that others could
follow. That shareable aspect is accounted for by the fact that the
relevant terms are widely used in connection with publicly observable
characteristics and situations.What Geach does not reject, however, is
that there are private experiences.These are not the only referents of
psychological predications, there is also behaviour; but in denying the
7. Peter Geach A Philosophical Autobiography in H. A. Lewis (ed.), Peter Geach:
Philosophical Encounters (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991) pp. 1314.
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idea of the psychological as an exclusively private domain, Geach is

careful to distinguish sense from reference. Phillips glosses this by
saying that unless there were a common life which people share,
which they were taught and came to learn, there could be no notion
of person.8
Adapting this to the theological context yields the thought that talk
about God and immortality gets its sense from common life, but that
this is compatible with it having a transcendent reference. To speak of
praying for the dead, or of the condition of the departed, logically
requires that the sense of these terms be such as could be grasped by
others, and if one is speaking to others then that means it is already
common currency.When we look at such discourse we can see that its
terms are used in connection with various religious practices such as
gathering images and other artefacts, relating narratives, adopting petitionary modes, focusing attention, reciting forms of words, invoking
invisible presences, and so on, and we can also say that such practices
are not merely contingent associations. If someone claimed to be
praying for the soul of a deceased person but did not engage in any of
these practices or intelligibly related ones, then we would reasonably
hesitate to accept that he was in fact praying.This is not to deny that
his avowal might be sincere, but absent some compensating religious
behaviour we would conclude that he was confused about what it is to
be praying.
Just as in the earlier case, however, accepting these points does not
require us to suppose that the reference of religious expressions is
confined to the behaviour from which they necessarily draw part of
their sense.There is also the question of how that behaviour itself is to
be characterised if reductionism is to be avoided. In the psychological
example Geach talks about recognising the links between experiential
terms and behavioural ones, writing that our ordinary talk about
seeing would cease to be intelligible if there were cut out of it such
expressions as I cant see, its too far off,I caught his eye,Dont look
round, etc.9 Notice, however, that members of the behavioural class
are themselves characterised in intentional terms.The other alternative
would be to identify them by means of non-intentional, physiological
or physico-dynamical predicates.That, however, would fail. First, there
are no identity and individuation conditions for these that would
8. Death and Immortality p. 5.
9. P. Geach, Immortality in God and the Soul, p. 21.
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intelligibly match those of ordinary action concepts. Second, even if

there were such it would be hard to see how the sense of psychological
terms could be given by reference to these; or if it could then that
would be tantamount to reducing psychology to behaviour in the
narrow physiological sense, which is something neither Geach nor
Phillips subscribe to.
So if reductionism is to be avoided, and the sense-constituting
behaviour is itself already psychologically described, we need to reconsider the relationship between the experiential and behavioural components of the sense of psychological terms. What suggests itself is
interactive partnership, each making its own distinctive contribution
and constraining the other. The situation in which psychological
concepts are formed is yet more complex, involving abstraction and
generalisation across ranges of sense-contributing factors, including
rationalistic constraints between and within types of psychological
states (such as that it is impossible to intend what you believe it to
be impossible to do, or to plan for what you believe has already
happened).
Similarly, the kinds of practices that contribute to the sense of talk
of a world to come, or of praying to and for the dead, etc., will already
have to be characterised in religious terms. Phillips touches on this at
one point when he writes:
Questions about the immortality of the soul are seen not to be
questions concerning the extent of a mans life, and in particular
concerning whether a mans life can extend beyond the grave, but
questions concerning the kind of life a man is living.
And yet, important though I think these conclusions are, they are
insufficient as an analysis of religious conceptions of eternal life and
the immortality of the soul.10

What follows is a discussion of the idea of overcoming death by

turning towards the eternal and dying to self, which then leads to the
somewhat Schleiermacherean conclusion I quoted earlier according to
which the immortality of the soul refers to a state of mortal life.
Without rejecting his good insights into the character of religious
spirituality, I wish to suggest that Phillips account remains open to the
objection that it has changed the subject, and that it has done so in a
way that loses contact with other sources that contribute to the sense

10. Death and Immortality p. 49.

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of talk of soul, immortality and the life of the world to come. I also
wish to revisit briefly the metaphysical issue of the possibility that
death is not the end, since in contrast to Phillips I do believe that
success or failure in resolving the logical difficulties facing this have
important consequences so far as belief in immortality is concerned.

III
Phillips is instructive in drawing discussion away from philosophical
abstractions and returning them to human realities, but he is nevertheless given to an abstractness of his own, for he tends, having alighted
on favoured examples or authors, to generalise in anthropological and
cultural terms, not necessarily attending to the differences or charting
the sources of particular conceptions.This observation is not intended
ad hominem, or in a spirit of outdoing his avowed aversion to philosophical abstraction, for generalisation and abstraction are necessary in
any broad enquiry. The point is rather that in the process some
important human realities seem to go undiscussed, most significant of
which is the Christian profession of Jesus Christs death, resurrection
and ascension.
Needless to say, western thinking about immortality draws upon
different strands of religious and philosophical thought that at times
have become badly tangled, and at other times damaged in becoming
or being separated. Nonetheless there are identifiable moments within
these. In the world in which Christianity was born, belief in personal
post-mortem existence was not at all common. Aristotelians supposed that an analysis of the human soul indicated the existence of an
immaterial principle, the active intellect (nous poetikos) of De Anima III,
5; but this was something abstract and universal: an actualising cause of
mindedness in individual human beings whose own minds perished
with their bodies, leaving nous as it always had been separate, unaffected and unmixed. For the most part the Stoics were agnostic about
and largely uninterested in personal immortality, holding to the view
that at death the sparks of divinity that animated individual lives are
drawn back into the Divine fire. The exceptions were those Stoics
(such as Seneca the Younger) who were influenced by Platonism and
Pythagoreanism, and it is to these two schools (and their founders) that
one has to look for Greek philosophical doctrines of personal immortality. What one finds, certainly in Platonism, is a characterisation of
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earthly, animal embodiment which views it as source of disorder and

ignorance; not something evil as in Manichaeism but nonetheless a
burden and an impediment to true personal existence. Here the soul
conforms to the sort of description that Phillips believes faces logical
difficulties concerning the description of its presumed-to-be essential
psychological functions, and the personal identity of a surviving
immaterial element. He writes:
The supposition, therefore, that something called a thinking substance could survive the disappearance or disconnection of these
other [physical bodily] features [of human existence] is fundamentally confused.A belief in the immortality of the soul which depends
on such suppositions while thinking it has grasped the essence of the
self has really grasped nothing at all.11

The Platonic/Cartesian conception of the soul is the one favoured by

philosophers seeking to demonstrate the difficulties of non-materialist
views of human persons; and because it appears to have a purely
philosophical provenance and character, focusing on it also saves
getting entangled in religious and theological intricacies.Yet Phillips
himself reminds us, repeatedly and emphatically, of the religious character of talk of souls and the afterlife so it will not do to leave this out.
The Acts of the Apostles relate that when St Paul reached Athens he
met Epicurean and Stoic philosophers who, hearing his talk about
Jesus and the resurrection, took him up on to the Areopagus hill and
asked him to deliver his teaching there. In the course of this (a scene
beautifully rendered by Raphael) Paul told them that they should
seek God:
Yet he is not far from each one of us, for In him we live and move
and have our being . . . but now he commands all men everywhere
to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the
world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this
he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead.12

On hearing these last words some mocked but others said We will
hear you again about this. Apparently, however, they did not, and
Pauls subsequent remarks regarding the vain wisdom of the philosophers suggests that he decided to concentrate his efforts on preaching

11. Death and Immortality p. 6.

12. Acts 17: 27, 3031.This and subsequent citations are from The Holy Bible: Revised
Standard Version Catholic Edition (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1966).
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Christs resurrection as a religious message to whoever might receive

it. The Epicureans and Stoics might have made the mistake of interpreting his earlier talk of resurrection (anastasis) as naming some
unfamiliar goddess Anastasia, but no such confusion could be sustained once Paul elaborated and talked of Jesus being raised from the
dead. This was a shocking teaching for the philosophers who either
excluded the possibility of post-mortem personal existence, or associated it with the liberated soul. Either way the idea that someone who
had died might then pass again among the living was, for them, an
absurdity.Yet it was this scandalous resurrection teaching that Paul later
made the foundation of his presentation of faith in Jesus. In his First
Letter to the Corinthians Paul writes:
Now I would remind you brethren in what terms I preached to you
the gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which you
are saved, if you hold it fast unless you believed in vain. For I
delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that
Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he
was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with
the scriptures, . . .
Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some
of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no
resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ
has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is
in vain.13

Here Paul ties the resurrection claim in three directions: back into
Hebrew scriptures to the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 and to the
godly one of Psalm 16 who will not enter Sheol (the abode of the
dead); across to the gospel of salvation through Christ; and forward to
the future life hoped for by the Corinthians (but about which they
have become anxious). Notwithstanding the references to earlier
anticipations, however, there was no extensive tradition of belief in
immortality in pre-Christian Judaism. Indeed until close to the time of
Jesus it was generally denied, and among his contemporaries only the
Pharisees and the Essenes appear to have believed in an afterlife.Yet
some five or so centuries earlier, Job was reported as affirming I know
that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth, and
after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see

13. 1 Corinthians 15: 14, 1214.

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God.14 And toward the end of the second century B.C., 2 Maccabees
writes of Judas Maccabeus that he made atonement for the dead, that
they might be delivered from their sin and that in doing this he acted
very well and honourably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he
were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it
would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead.15
The lesson of Wittgensteins reflections on apparently simple
naming is that there is no such thing as pure, atomistic ostensive
definition. Even where ostension is unburdened by the difficulties of
presumed logical privacy, it is answerable to the requirement to provide
pointing with some form of referent-constraining sense.The possibility of reapplying the same term to the same object, or to another like
it, requires some type of sortal identification, and this cannot intelligibly be supposed to stand in isolation. Related considerations have led
some philosophers to insist that there is no semantically coherent unit
smaller than an entire language (or language game), and others that
every term is theoretical, its meaning being given by the network of
generalisations in which it features. Setting these bold and improbable
hypotheses to one side, however, there remains the insight that new
objects, events, features and so on, are introduced within an existing
framework of concepts and conceptually informed practices.
Paul observes this condition when he speaks of Christs resurrection tying it in the three directions I mentioned. But there is a fourth
direction which he proceeds towards in the Corinthians chapter
quoted above. He writes:
That he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.Then he appeared
to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are
still alive. . . . Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.16

So we have Christ was raised from the dead drawing meaning from
(i) Hebrew experiences of suffering and hopes for salvation; (ii) the
content of Christs teaching about himself and his purpose; (iii) the
Corinthians understanding and fear of human mortality, and (iv)
experiences, third and first personal, of Christs post-crucifixion
appearances. The resurrection claim in turn enters into the interpre-

14. Job 19: 2526.

15. 2 Maccabees 12: 4345.
16. 1 Corinthians 15: 58.
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tation of these, and they and it into subsequent Christian understandings of death and immortality.When the issue of belief in immortality
is raised for discussion it is appropriate to ask which belief? and
generalisations about theories of immaterial bodies, immaterial souls
and resurrected persons are too broad for the purposes of comprehending how the issue was understood by Pauline Christians and those
who followed in this tradition. Here one needs to attend to the way in
which talk of life after death links in with the matters identified above:
faithful appeals and hopes, anticipated fulfilments, personal experiences
and theological reflections.
Of course, one might try to Phillipsise these claims so as to free
them from any metaphysical or ontological significance, but this
response invites three objections. Firstly, it looks to be regressive.
Claims about surviving death are interpreted as expressions of a
religious outlook on this life, and other claims of an unmistakably
religious sort are then interpreted in the same way. Religious,
however, is itself denied anything but an attitudinal reading whose
distinctive character either begins to evaporate or is fixed by reference
to attitudes to religious stories and images. What makes these religious once more appears to be the attitudes taken towards them, ones
of reverence and awe, say. But this seems to get things back to front, or
at least to be inaptly unilateral; for in discriminating between different
attitudes we need to make some reference to their proper objects.
Phillips wants to say that God is to be interpreted in terms of
Godly attitudes (understood very broadly), whereas the characterisation of such orientations, along with other intentional attitudes, is
defeasibly to be given by reference to their objects. Certainly one may
allow some influence in both directions, but only to allow it in only
one direction seems premature and close to stipulative.
This leads to the second point, which is that Phillips appears
resolute in not allowing any other interpretation. As noted earlier, his
proposal is not that something other than the metaphysical should be
looked to because the metaphysical option proves impossible; but
rather than the metaphysical option should not be looked to at all.
Sometimes he suggests a distinction between religion and superstition,
with the latter being the belief in God as a supremely powerful agent
within the Universe, and prayer and the rest being quasi-empirical
processes of influence and exchange.That is a recognisable characterisation of a superstitious simulacrum of religion, but it has long been
denounced as such from within the ranks of religious believers who
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patently presume a metaphysical dimension to their faith.The debates

within Western Christianity over works and justification, or over
prayer for and to the dead, or about devotion to saints and the
veneration of Mary, or about the status of the Mass as the mystical
presentation of the sacrifice of Calvary or as its idolatrous representation, have often included allegations of superstition without it being
supposed for a moment that true faith was without ontological presuppositions. Superstition on this account does not consist in making
metaphysical claims but in making the wrong ones and falling short of
the transcendent reality that true religion aspires to. Phillips closes off
that distinction by treating as misconceived any attempt to interpret
the internal accusatives of religious verbs (worshiping, praying to,
hoping for, etc.) as aspiring to transcendent reference.That, however,
looks increasingly stipulative and question-begging.
The third objection is one of simple implausibility.What we read in
Maccabees and in Paul about certain beliefs and practices being in vain
unless death is not the end, bears no other serious interpretation than
that the authors supposed that unless it is literally the case that natural
death does not mark the cessation of our existence, then various
religious beliefs are without foundation or purpose. Paul preached
Christ risen; and the structure of the New Testament hinges on Jesus
death and resurrection. Notwithstanding the efforts of demythologising scriptural interpreters, themselves generally motivated by naturalistic philosophical prejudices, there is no credible alternative to
understanding the early Christian Church and its martyrs other than
by reference to their belief in Christ rising from the dead and living
eternally. It is a useful corrective to spiritualising hermeneutics to read
Book IX of Augustines Confessions where he recounts the last days,
death and funeral of his mother Monica. He writes:
As the day now approached on which she was to depart this life
a day which thou knewest, but which we did not it happened,
though I believe it was by thy secret ways arranged, that she and I
stood alone, leaning in a certain window from which the garden of
the house we occupied at Ostia could be seen. . . . We were conversing alone very pleasantly and forgetting those things which are
past, and reaching forward toward those things which are future
[Philippians 3. 13].We were in the present and in the presence of
Truth, which thou art, discussing together what is the nature of
the eternal life of the saints: which eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
neither has entered into the heart of man. (10. 23)
[Then following her death]
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So, when the body was carried forth, we went and returned
without tears. For neither in those prayers which we poured forth to
thee, when the sacrifice of our redemption was offered up to thee
for her with the body placed by the side of the grave as the custom
is there, before it is lowered down into it neither in those prayers
did I weep.17

Augustine speaks matter-of-factly of their speculations about the life

to come, and refers to the requiem Mass (Missa pro defunctis) said on
Monicas behalf, and the rite of committal of the body by the grave.
No doubt these personal and liturgical events involved reflections on
the spiritual condition of the participants, but it is beyond dispute that
they are referred to the presumed realities of God, soul and immortality, and in a manner that takes the transcendent to be a precondition
of the intelligibility and validity of those events. Of course, this does
nothing to show that those beliefs and their suppositions are true but
it does return our attention to the philosophical question of whether
they could be so.

IV
Besides taking up Geachs criticisms of soulbody dualism from his
essay, Immortality, Phillips devotes a lengthy discussion to a later
chapter of God and the Soul on The Moral Law and the Law of God.
His reason for doing so is that he sees it as an example of a style of
argument linking morality and immortality (conceived metaphysically).The idea is that it would be reasonable to expect a future life if
there were absolute prohibitions, because the only way in which these
could be rationally grounded would be by reference to Divine commands which it would be in ones long-term interest to observe.
Morality on this account is logically connected to the four last things:
death, judgement, heaven and hell. This is an overly brief gloss of an
interesting but not uncontroversial reading of Geachs essay. Given
Phillips rejection of the possibility of post-mortem survival or resurrection, the point of the further discussion is to disconnect morality
from the idea of heavenly reward or punishment. This he does by
suggesting that Geachs instrumentalist or prudential view fails to
17. Augustine, Confessions translated and edited by A. C. Oulter, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955) Book IX, Chs. 10, 23 and 12. 32
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capture the real nature of morality as a set of ideals that neither require
nor could be given any external justification:What needs to be done
is to give up the conception of morality as a guide to conduct, and to
see that the beliefs and ideals for which one has a regard are themselves
the terms in which we see what we ought to do, the alternatives which
face us and the consequences of our actions.18
Leaving aside the question of whether the contrast between morality as a guide to action and as a set of autonomous ideals is not
mis-drawn, and allowing Phillips preferred characterisation, this is
entirely compatible with the idea that the form, source and meaning
of morality derive from God and from his plan for our eternal life. One
way in which this might be so would be if moral values reflected Gods
nature as love, and the embodiment of that love in creatures; if
goodness comes from God and reaches back to Him, both in the sense
of pointing to its source and also in the sense, in persons, of searching
and striving for unconditional love. Phillips writes:
It is only when a man has become absorbed by the love of God that
he ceases to ask such questions [what is the point of bothering to
obey Gods commands?], not because he is sure of his profit, but
because profit has nothing to do with the character of his love.The
immortality of the soul has to do, not with its existence after death
and all the consequences that is supposed to carry with it, but with
his participation in Gods life, in his contemplation of divine love.

Delete not with its existence after death and all the consequences that
is supposed to carry with it but and what remains is certainly compatible with the idea of an afterlife. I have also suggested that on a
familiar understanding of the remainder it presupposes belief in metaphysical realities of soul and God. In conclusion I will outline a case for
thinking that it may also presuppose the fact of immortality.
Although Phillips evidently had God and the Soul before him when
writing Death and Immortality, he does not mention its third chapter
What Do We Think With? in which Geach argues against both
materialism and immaterialism, these being, respectively, the views that
we think with a material part of ourselves (the brain), and that we
think with an immaterial part (the soul). As Geach points out, as
described materialism and immaterialism are contraries and hence
while they cannot both be true they could both be false. He then

18. Death and Immortality, p. 32.

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argues that certain properties of thought are such that it cannot be a

material process, hence materialism is false. Given his earlier rejection
of PlatonicCartesian dualism he concludes to the truth not of immaterialism but of anti-materialism: thinking is a basic, non-material
human activity. A move away from materialism does not, of course,
bring us immortality, and Geachs own preferred interpretation of this
is through the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection.This Phillips
does discuss (in connection with the essay on Immortality), pressing
the issue of the identity of the ante- and post-mortem persons. His
objection to Geachs proposal of a one-to-one relation between these
is to say that if such a connection existed then why should we say that
the previous bodies had died? He continues But, of course we know
with certainty that all human beings die. Even if the [one-to-one
connection] supposition is conceivable, it does not follow that it makes
sense now for us to say that men live after death.19
This is unduly conceptually conservative. Earlier we saw how the
meaning of concepts relating to immortality and afterlife tie in with
other claims, central among which in the present context is Pauls
preaching of the resurrected Christ. Believing that, it makes sense to
say I know all men die but I know also that my redeemer lives,for as
by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the
dead. For as in Adam all men die, so also in Christ shall all be made
alive (1 Corinthians 2122).The point here is conceptual not metaphysical, and is addressed simply to Phillips suggestion that our ordinary knowledge that all men die is in tension with the supposition that
someone who had died then lived again.
There is, though, a related objection to this possibility deriving from
an application of Lockes principle that one thing cannot have two
beginnings of existence.20 If we say that A came into being at time 1,
and ceased to be at time 2, then we cannot say that A existed at time
3. If A originated at t 1 and is in existence at t 3, then A never ceased
to exist at t 2. Much might be said here, but for present purposes let
me just make two brief points. Firstly, there is an ambiguity in the
phrase beginnings of existence. It might be interpreted, as it usually
is, to exclude gaps in the history of one and the same object; but since
there are clear cases in which objects having been brought into
19. Death and Immortality, p. 16.
20. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. 27: Of Identity
and Diversity.
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existence are then taken apart and later reassembled, this is an implausibly demanding requirement on identity. Better then to distinguish
between absolute and phasal origination. Some piece of machinery M
came into existence at the factory at t 1, then existed as such until t 2
when it was taken to pieces; these remained dismantled until t 3 when
they were reassembled and M came to be (phasally) again. Here t 1 is
also a point of phasal beginning, but it is the one and only point of
absolute origination. Likewise, then, we might say that Jesus came into
being (absolutely and phasally) at the point of his conception; ceased
to be at the point of his death, and came to be again (phasally) at the
moment of his resurrection.
On that gap-inclusive account of identity there is a sense in which
it may be said that one who is resurrected never ceased to exist save in
the respect that one phase ended and another began. In general that is
unproblematic, but and this is the second brief point there may be
particular reasons to think that in the case of rational beings there is
also the possibility of a persisting carrier of identity across the gap in
bodily existence. Leaving aside particular theological reasons for
favouring this in the case of Christ,21 if one is disposed to reject
materialism regarding human persons, on account of the nature of
consciousness or intellectual activity say, then, deploying the principle
acting follows upon being, agere sequitur esse, there may be reason to
consider that the proper subjects of consciousness or intellection
cannot be material substances. Even if a disembodied subject of consciousness or of thought hardly constitutes a human person, in part for
the reasons favoured by Geach and by Phillips, such a residual entity
might yet prove sufficient to constitute the one-to-one relation
between ante- and post-mortem incarnate persons. Such was the view
of Aquinas whom Geach quotes (from his Commentary on 1 Corinthians. 15) as saying my soul is not I.22
I want to conclude, however, not with a metaphysical argument
from the ontological nature of attributes, but with a line of thought
that would have appealed to Phillips philosophical preferences and to
21. According to the Apostles Creed, between death and resurrection Christ
descended into hell [crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus, descendit ad nferos, tertia die resurrexit
a mortuis]. Hell in this context is not a place of damnation but limbus partum, the
condition in which the just of earlier generations awaited the liberating saviour.
22. Aquinas, Super 1 Epistolam Pauli ad Corinthios. Lectio 2: anima autem cum sit pars
corporis hominis, non est totus homo, et anima mea non est ego: the soul since it is part of a
mans body is not the whole man, and my soul is not I.
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his ironic sense of humour. If enquiries into the metaphysical character

of mental processes seemed aberrant to him it was because he believed
that the life, meaning and value of thought lay in its content. As it
happens there are some arguments from the substance of human
thought and feeling to transcendental realities, although they are generally neglected. Elsewhere I have examined the argument from our
inclination to believe in God, and from our desire for Him, to His
existence.23 Here I end by introducing an argument to our immortality from our love of God and His love of us. The pleasing irony is
that the author of this proof is one and the same as the man credited
with authoring the most purely a priori of proofs of Gods existence,
namely St Anselm.
Sometime in the 1070s the Abbot of Bec set out to discover that
one argument (unum argumentum) that would provide a fount for
theological speculation. Believing he had found it, he then set it down
in the Proslogion. A decade before, however, in the Monologion he had
presented a series of reflections on several fundamental issues including
immortality. There (in Chaps. 6869) he argues as follows:24
(1) To be rational is to be able to distinguish between just and unjust,
true and untrue, good and not good, and greater good and lesser
good.
(2) But without appropriate love and loathing of the objects so
distinguished, these rational capacities are devoid of purpose.
(3) Therefore, since the point of rationality is to distinguish these
qualities, the purpose is also to love or spurn the objects so judged.
(4) Rational creatures are made to distinguish and to love the supreme
essence: God.
(5) Since human persons are rational creatures therefore they were
created to know and to love the supreme essence.
(6) Either they were created (a) to love it eternally, or (b) only to love
it finitely.
(7) But (b) is blasphemous (and hence impossible), for God would not
create persons in order for them then either to turn against so
great a good, or else to lose it contrary to its will.Therefore, they
were created to love it eternally.
23. John Haldane, Philosophy, the Restless Heart and the Meaning of Theism, Ratio,
Vol. XIX, No. 4, 2006, pp. 421240.
24. See Monologion in Anselm of Canterbury:The Major Works, B. Davies and G. R.
Evans (eds.), (Oxford: OUP, 1998) pp. 7374.
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(8) But a person cannot love God eternally unless it lives eternally.
(9) Therefore persons were created in order that they might live
forever, so long as they choose to do that for which they were
created.
Space does not admit of commentary so I will only remark, first,
that I regard this as a genuinely interesting argument meriting further
study; second, that while it presumes the existence of God, in context
that is not problematic, and the conclusion adds interestingly to the
usual theistic assumptions; third, that premise (2) is insightful into the
value of rational faculties; fourth, that the character of the thought
about persons and their relation to God ought to resonate with a
Phillipsean sensibility; and fifth, that judging and loving are intentional
attitudes, and the argument does not require that someone who loves
God does so knowingly. D. Z. Phillips sought to know and love the
highest good and would not willingly have turned against it. But a
person cannot love the highest good (God) eternally unless he lives
eternally. In providence, therefore, I pray that Dewi Phillips lives to see
the glorious refutation of his benign scepticism about the resurrection
of the dead and the life of the world to come.25
Department of Moral Philosophy
University of St Andrews
Fife KY16 9AL
jjh1@st-and.ac.uk

25. The writing of this paper was made possible by research support from the Institute
for the Psychological Sciences. I am grateful to Dr Gladys Sweeney, Dean of the
Institute, for facilitating this support.
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