This article explores the concept of non-personal immortality. Non-personal theories of immortality claim that even though there is no personal or individual survival of death, it is still possible to continue to exist in a non-personal state. The most important challenge for non-personal conceptions of immortality is solving the apparent contradiction between on the one hand accepting that individual existence ends with death and on the other hand maintaining that death nevertheless is not equal to total annihilation. I present two theories of non-personal immortality found in Schopenhauer and William James and derive a set of systematic core theses from them. Finally, I discuss whether the notion of non-personal immortality is consistent, and whether a non-personal afterlife could be desirable.

This article addresses the theme of ‘death and immortality’ from the perspective of consciousness, and takes as its starting point a root text of Hindu philosophy, the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Īśvarakṛṣṇa (c. fourth century ce). The text posits a dualist ontology in which consciousness is separate and autonomous from a material reality that includes body and mind. The goal is to be ontologically situated in a ‘pure’ consciousness (non-objective), which signifies existential liberation. There are mundane ways to understand this claim, such as referring to cognitive states that produce affective dissociation, or more radical interpretations, such as a post-death state. This article explores the question of what Sāṃkhya's consciousness is like: it is said to be immortal, plural, individuated, and contentless. What is the motivation for and implication of engagement with a system that describes an existential freedom that may only be known in a dualist reality or after death? And how can Sāṃkhya's concepts be brought into conversation with contemporary investigations into mind–body questions? Sāṃkhya rationality counters the argument of eternal oblivion or of consciousness as an illusion confined to the brain. Yet there are resonances with Chalmers's notion of consciousness as fundamental. This article concludes that contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion can be enhanced by adding Sāṃkhya thought to its purview.

According to Carolyne Larrington, legends of the past ‘offer particular kinds of answers – beautiful and mysterious answers. . . – to very large questions through a kind of metaphorical thinking . . . which, in their stripped-down clarity, show us what's really important in an unfamiliar light’. The claim that ‘what is really important [is disclosed] by casting it in an unfamiliar light’ I take into a philosophical engagement with the figure of the ghost. Far from being of dubious interest for the philosopher of religion, the continuing fascination with ghosts and hauntings offers promising ground for the discussion of religion, for the study of ghosts holds out the possibility of engaging with the wonder and terror of the human condition. The figure of something that is dead yet alive is a creative representation of the fact that we who are alive are also mortal, destined to die. The resulting confrontation with death arouses anxiety, but also has the potential to enrich life. The wisdom of the ghost thus enables the possibility of returning philosophy of religion to the great themes of human existence – birth, suffering, loss, and death – which provide rich resources for understanding religion and its relation to the experience of being human.

Michael Almeida has recently tried to show that if S5 correctly represents metaphysical necessity, there can be no non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God. Evidence would thus be irrelevant to the reasonability of traditional theistic belief. Almeida's argument has implications beyond its announced target: it amounts to a new argument for sweeping scepticism. Almeida's argument for the irrelevance of evidence to the existence of God would apply to any state of affairs that entails some metaphysical necessity. In S5, every state of affairs entails some metaphysical necessity, so Almeida should conclude that non-trivial evidence for or against any state of affairs is impossible. I argue that the problem is not with S5 but with inadequately motivated assumptions about evidential support. Avoiding those assumptions disables the argument for sweeping scepticism and without foreclosing the possibility of non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God.

In this article, I present a defence of conceptual plausibility, understood as an epistemic way to qualify concepts that situates them between the merely possible and the actual. To show that there is such a thing as conceptual plausibility, I rely on what seems to lie at the heart of many uses of the phrase ‘plausible concept’: explanatory fruitfulness. To make an effective case for the claim that conceptual plausibility is of philosophical interest, I present an argument based on the debate over the rationality of theistic belief and the concept of God. To show that conceptual plausibility is philosophically feasible, I first show that it cannot be reduced to propositional plausibility. Next, I offer a minimally precise characterization of conceptual plausibility; I approach this from a qualitative and comparative perspective as well. Finally, I show how these qualitative and comparative criteria of conceptual plausibility might be applied to the debate over the rationality of theistic belief and the concept of God.

We assess John Bishop's theory of the nature of Christian faith in God, as most recently expressed in ‘Reasonable Faith and Reasonable Fideism’, although we dip into other writings as well. We explain several concerns we have about it. However, in the end, our reflections lead us to propose a modified theory, one that avoids our concerns while remaining consonant with some of his guiding thoughts about the nature of Christian faith in God. We also briefly examine three normative issues Bishop's views present.

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, I will reconstruct Mullā Ṣadrā's complex arguments for the soul's immortality based on its immaterial nature. Second and finally, I will briefly probe and assess various epistemological and metaphysical objections against Ṣadrā's immaterialist conception of the soul. Ṣadrā contends that our bodily death marks an awakening to the reality of our consciousness on the plane of the imaginal realm (the imaginal world is an isthmus between the sensible world and the world of intelligible forms). For Ṣadrā, ‘death’ does not mark an end or discontinuity in human consciousness, rather it signifies an awakening to a new mode of existence in which the soul, having once been the active principle controlling the actions of the physical body, now manifests itself as the passive recipient of the form given to it by its imaginal reality – a reality shaped by the actions it had performed in its earthly, embodied state. Thus, death is seen as the passage of the soul from the sensible to the imaginal world, until the soul unites with the intelligible world (ʿālam al-ʿaql).

The Buddhist doctrine of transmigration (saṃsāra) offers a coherent model of a cycle of existence wherein a sentient being continues throughout life, survives death, traverses the afterlife, and is, sooner or later, reborn, thus inaugurating another lifecycle as a new life-form. The Buddhist tenets of no-self (anātman) and impermanence, however, deny the possibility of a self, soul, or any form of spiritual substance that persists throughout the cycle of transmigration. This article examines the argumentation developed by the Indic Buddhist philosopher, Saṅghabhadra (fl. fifth- century ce), as part of his effort to reconcile the doctrines of no-self and karmic continuity. In his *Nyāyānusāraśāstra and the *Samayapradīpikāśāstra, two seminal, yet vastly understudied, doctrinal treatises of Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma Buddhism that survive only within the translation corpus of the Sinitic scholar-monk Xuanzang (602?–664 ce), Saṅghabhadra defines the antarābhava, the ‘intermediate state of existence’, as the interstitial space and interim time-period existing between the locus wherein the sequentially reproducing psychic constituents of an individual sentient being, including consciousness, desert the no-longer viable body at the moment of biological death, and the locus wherein these psychic constituents become associated with a new gross physical body in the form of a new viable embryo at the moment of rebirth. By instantiating the antarābhava as an actual interval with real extension in space and time, necessarily traversed by the vast majority of sentient beings after dying in order to reach the next gross physical body, Saṅghabhadra provides, for Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma Buddhism, a rigorous account for how karma is transmitted, via the psychic constituents of a sentient being, beyond biological death into future lives, as well as future afterlives.

Panentheism is the position that the world is in some sense ‘in’ God, and God ‘in’ the world, without the world being identical to God. Thus, it tries, like what I call mainstream theism and against pantheism, to protect the transcendence of God, while giving greater emphasis to his immanence in creation than the former. I aim to explicate an approach that I call Orthodox Panentheism. The word ‘orthodox’ is to be read in two ways. First, the picture is derived from the writings of some of the most important figures in Eastern Christian thought, so that it is Orthodox in the ‘big “O” sense’. Second, I hope to show that it is a legitimate Christian picture of the God–world relation which is both distinctive and worthy of being called ‘panentheism’ – an orthodox panentheism in the ‘little “o” sense’.

Much of the literature on religious fictionalism has emphasized that religious fictionalists employing a theistic fiction cannot just leave evil out of the fiction, and that on the contrary, they face worries that very closely parallel the worries raised by the problem of evil. This article argues that when religious fictionalism is construed most charitably, these worries do not arise. It explores three fictionalist approaches to evil (Excision, Completeness, and Inconsistency), shows that each can serve religious fictionalist ends, and recommends a pluralist stance towards them.

In this article, I argue that sceptical theists have too narrow a focus: they consider only God's axiological reasons, ignoring any non-axiological reasons he may have. But this is a mistake: predicting how God will act requires knowing about his reasons in general, and this requires knowing about both God's axiological and non-axiological reasons. In light of this, I construct and defend a kind of sceptical theism – Deontological Sceptical Theism – that encompasses all of God's reasons, and briefly illustrate how it renders irrelevant certain charges of excessive sceptical and how it evaporates equiprobability objections. Furthermore, I put forth a simple argument in favour of Deontological Sceptical Theism, which shows that everyone (at least currently) ought to endorse it.

Religious expressivism is the view that religious sentences, like ‘God is all-loving’ and ‘God offers us the gift of salvation’, are devoid of cognitive meaning. Such sentences are not truth-evaluable: they cannot be judged as true or false. In Religious Language, Michael Scott asked what explains the seeming logical behaviour of religious sentences if they are not truth-evaluable, as religious expressivists claim. In particular, religious expressivists need to explain (i) how a given religious sentence and its negation seem inconsistent and (ii) how religious sentences could figure in logically valid arguments. In this article, I develop a version of Weak Kleene semantics that could address these two ‘logic’ challenges.

Saul Smilansky presents us with a puzzle which, in combination with a small number of premises, is supposed to generate a reversal of Pascal's wager: the wagerer should bet on a secular lifestyle, and reject religion, as the surest way of pleasing God (if God exists). In this article, we argue that the puzzle, once unpacked, isn't particularly puzzling, that the premises aren't true, and that Smilansky's wager is open to both reductio and a reversal of its own.

This article explores the structure of cultivated religious experience. For the Buddhist philosopher Jñānaśrīmitra (c. 980–1040), the religious experience of the Buddhist yogin (yogipratyakṣa) is not spontaneous or sporadic but must be intentionally and rationally cultivated. I argue that Jñānaśrīmitra's picture parallels certain contemporary constructivist accounts of religious experience, according to which the prejudices, expectations, and interpretative structures of the practitioner shape the character of the experience in question. Despite this, however, Jñānaśrīmitra maintains that religious experience is direct, non-conceptual, and ineffable. Even though cultivation begins by focusing on rationally understood, effable conceptual content (the Buddha's teaching of the Four Nobles' Truths, for instance), the yogin's relation to that content is transformed through cultivation (bhāvanā). Cultivation makes awareness-events with conceptual content vivid (spaṣṭa) in such a way that they lose their conceptual character, coming to affect the practitioner's mind as if they were external to it. In this way, precisely in virtue of beginning the process of cultivation with certain expectations about the Buddha's teaching, Buddhist yogins come to have a direct and non-conceptual experience of the breakdown of their own mental streams and the dissolution of the sense of self.

This article offers some reflections on Christina Van Dyke's Hidden Wisdom, using the opportunity to make some suggestions as to possible lines of influence between the world of scholastic theology and that of the female medieval mystics in what Van Dyke considers their ‘annihilationist’ mode: that the goal of the spiritual life is transformation into God in some sense.

This article expands my previous work on omnisubjectivity, the divine property of having a complete and perfect grasp of the subjective states of all beings who have such states. By a subjective state I mean a conscious state as that state is experienced by the one who has it. I argue that only a being with subjectivity can be omnisubjective, and therefore, God has subjective states. The article explores the subjectivity of God as it applies to the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, focusing on the important difference between a person and an instance of a nature. I propose that the uniqueness of persons is grounded in their unique subjective states, not their objective nature. Each person of the Trinity has a unique point of view and unique subjectivity even though they share an objective divine nature instantiated in a single divine being. The Son has a single set of subjective states before, during, and after the Incarnation. Each member of the Trinity is omnisubjective and fully grasps the unique subjective states of each other person of the Trinity. The perfect comprehension of each other while remaining unique persons is a model of perfect love within a community of persons.

This article concerns the problem of eternal hell in Islam as an aporetic problem of evil with a focus on Aijaz's description of the Islamic soteriology. I contest his description of Islamic culpability and his claim that all non-Muslims are regarded as kâfir and consigned to eternal hell. First, I aim to illustrate the pitfalls in his line of argumentation such as crude generalizations and selective reading of the Islamic sources, which seem to render his argument a strawman fallacy. I offer a more accurate analysis of the Islamic view, by arguing that only a limited group of people who fight against truth through evil actions are considered as kâfir. Second, building on my analysis of the notion of kâfir, I address the question whether God's perfect love and wisdom are compatible with limited salvific exclusivism. Thus, I aim to elaborate on the rationale behind the prescription of eternal punishment for the kâfir in the Quran in the rest of the article, by arguing that the kâfir is incapable of genuine repentance due to his character formed by his free choices. This, in turn, makes it impossible to achieve retributive justice through a finite punishment concerning the kâfir's evil actions.

Given that the more apophatic strand of mysticism resonates more with the way contemporary philosophers are apt to think about mystical experience, the fact that apophatic mysticism was a bit of a fringe enterprise in the Middle Ages calls for explanation. The explanations that are suggested within the pages of Christina Van Dyke's A Hidden Wisdom are not typically historical-contextual explanations, but theological ones. This article examines apophatic mysticism in terms of three of the standard theological loci: creation, Incarnation, and Trinity. In each case we will find that some of the characteristic claims of the apophatic mystics are so much at odds with the mainstream of Christian theology that the mystery is not so much their being marginalized but rather their being largely tolerated.