(Princeton University Press) The author sets out to construct a new understanding of personal identity and the self, ultimately providing a naturalistic account of surviving death. Johnston claims that all existing theological views of the afterlife are either incoherent or at odds with the workings of nature. Instead, he argues for a connection between philosophical study of the self and accounts of goodness in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism: a truly good person, he states, has undergone a death of self and lives a life transformed by imaginatively figuring into the lives of others. Finding his or her own end to be comparatively unimportant, the good person can see through death. And, he suggests, the good person actually survives death: the future-directed concern that defines true goodness also ensures that the good live on in new generations of humankind. Johnston is the Walter Cerf Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and the author of Saving God: Religion after Idolatry .
