April 4 - "How Reincarnation Works", a research talk by Justin Mooney
3 April 2024
Join us on April 4 from 3:30-5:30 PM MDT in person, in the Philosophy Department seminar room (Assiniboia Hall 2-02A), or online for "How Reincarnation Works", a research talk by Justin Mooney.
Abstract: I argue that rebirth (reincarnation) is metaphysically versatile in the sense that it can be made to work with a variety of popular metaphysical views about the human person. By drawing on the Buddhist appeal to karmic causation in place of a transmigrating soul, I sketch defensible accounts of rebirth for Baker’s constitutionalism, Lewis’s four-dimensionalism, and Olson’s animalism. The upshot: the hypothesis that we are reborn after we die is not highly sensitive to the outcome of debates about the metaphysics of the human person, contrary to what some authors seem to have supposed.
Bio: Justin Mooney is currently a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Alberta. Previously, he was a visiting assistant professor in the philosophy department at Denison University. He completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022. He specializes in metaphysics, especially material objects, and the philosophy of religion.
Zoom ID: 920 6023 5649
Passcode: 470504
Abstract: I argue that rebirth (reincarnation) is metaphysically versatile in the sense that it can be made to work with a variety of popular metaphysical views about the human person. By drawing on the Buddhist appeal to karmic causation in place of a transmigrating soul, I sketch defensible accounts of rebirth for Baker’s constitutionalism, Lewis’s four-dimensionalism, and Olson’s animalism. The upshot: the hypothesis that we are reborn after we die is not highly sensitive to the outcome of debates about the metaphysics of the human person, contrary to what some authors seem to have supposed.
Bio: Justin Mooney is currently a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Alberta. Previously, he was a visiting assistant professor in the philosophy department at Denison University. He completed a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022. He specializes in metaphysics, especially material objects, and the philosophy of religion.
Zoom ID: 920 6023 5649
Passcode: 470504