• List of Contributors


• Acknowledgments


• Samuel Scheffler


• Introduction


• Niko Kolodny


• Death and the Afterlife


• Samuel Scheffler


• Lecture One: The Afterlife (Part I)


• Lecture Two: The Afterlife (Part II)


• Lecture Three: Fear, Death, and Confidence


• Comments and Replies


• The Significance of Doomsday


• Susan Wolf


• How the Afterlife Matters


• Harry G. Frankfurt


• Preserving the Valued or Preserving Valuing?


• Seana Valentine Shiffrin


• That I Should Die and Others Live


• Niko Kolodny


• Death, Value, and the Afterlife: Responses


• Samuel Scheffler


• Index

Samuel Scheffler is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author of Human Morality, Boundaries and Allegiances, and Equality and Tradition. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, he delivered the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Berkeley, on which this book is based.

We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a "collective afterlife" in which humanity survives long after we are gone.