Philosophical Critique of Empirical Arguments for Postmortem Survival

Dr. Michael Sudduth (D.Phil., University of Oxford) is a philosopher of religion at San Francisco State University, with previous appointments at Saint Michael's College and Calvin College. His previous book The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology explored the propriety and role of arguments for God's existence in the Protestant theological tradition.

'Michael Sudduth has produced a ground-breaking work - original, nuanced, empirically comprehensive, and conceptually sophisticated. It sheds new light on the confusions and superficiality dominating the literature on postmortem survival, and is a major contribution to survival research.' -Stephen Braude, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Maryland, USA

• 1 Introduction: The Classical Empirical Survival Debate 2 Exploring the Hypothesis of Personal Survival 3 Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences 4 Mediumistic Communications 5 Cases of the Reincarnation Type 6 Classical Explanatory Arguments for Survival 7 Bayesian Explanatory Arguments 8 Bayesian Defenses of the Survival Hypothesis 9 The Problem of Auxiliary Assumptions 10 Exotic Counter-Explanations 11 Conclusion: The Classical Arguments Defeated