12.06.: Preis für LSIs Innsbruck und München

Auf der Jahreskonferenz der Local Societies Initiative (LSI) in Philadelphia haben die LSIs Innsbruck und München für ihr gemeinsames Projekt am 5. Juni 2007 vom Metanexus-Institute einen mit 20000 $ dotierten Preis erhalten.

Das Projekt wurde auf unserer RSNG-Jahrestagung 2005 geboren und zeigt damit, dass unsere Vernetzungsinitiative lohnende Früchte trägt.

In Christianity (as in Judaism and Islam as well) surviving death is not simply a natural attribute of human beings. Death amounts to the annihilation of the person. Every person “lives on after death because God acts to make it happen.” (Davis 2001, 238) This taken for granted we ask what of our earthly existence lives on after death? And how has this ‘what’ to be conceived?

Crucial for our hope of resurrecting is that we as humans resurrect. As Peter Geach puts it: “The possibility of life after death for Peter Geach appears to stand and fall with the possibility of there being once again a man identifiable as Peter Geach. (…) If only souls are saved, I am not saved and even in such a truncated form, individual existence seems to require at least a persistent possibility of the soul’s again entering into the make-up of a man who is identifiably Peter Geach.” (Geach, P.: What must be true of me if I survive my death; in: Davis, B. (ed.), Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000, 724-734.)

There is much of discussion going on how the Christian doctrine of resurrection shall coherently be conceived. Traditionally the account of Thomas Aquinas was taken as being the most elaborated concept of resurrection in the Catholic thinking (for a survey see E. Stump, Resurrection, Reassembly, and Reconstitution; in: Niederbacher, B. / Runggaldier, E. (eds.): Die menschliche Seele. Brauchen wir den Dualismus? Frankfurt a. M.: ontos 2006, 153-174). On Aquinas’ account, resurrection is not so much a reassembly of integral material parts of a former earthly body as it is reconstitution of metaphysical parts, that is the substantial form or soul, and the matter which is configured by the soul into a body.

This approach to resurrection appears very technical. Maybe this is a major reason why modern theologians prefer to talk about human afterlife in terms of divine communication and relationship. It is said that as dialogic partners of God we will survive our death. It is God constituting and guaranteeing our identity by entering in a process of communication with us. As true as such statements may be we are still confronted with the question how our diachronic identity has to be conceived. That the Christian hope in resurrection is a mystery of faith does not imply that one cannot aim at explaining or elucidating what its content is.

A concept of personal identity robust enough to survive our death is a pillar with which the Christian creed and hope of resurrection and life in God’s presence stands or falls. The Innsbruck/Munich-Project aims at spelling out how a notion of personal identity robust enough for post-mortem survival might look like. At this point the project is directly linked to the ongoing interdisciplinary discussions of the LSI-Group Innsbruck on the human soul from an Aristotelian perspective.

It seems to us that the Aristotelian concept of soul is well applicable to neuro-biological findings stressing the importance of the organizational and functional structure of the human organism for an adequate conception of human identity. “No component remains the same for very long (…). What remains the same, in good parts, is the constitution plan for our organism structure and the set points for the operation of its parts.” (Damasio, A. R.: The Feeling of What Happens. Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace 1999, 144)

Although we change permanently throughout life, the structure and functional principle of our organism remains largely unchanged. Bodily processes are grounded in a unifying principle, which persists soundly from the beginning to the end of our life.

It makes sense to investigate concepts of personal identity in an interdisciplinary endeavour. Natural sciences are able to tell about the physical conditions which are to be met for our identity. Natural sciences give us concepts that tie the concept of personal resurrection to our concrete existence in the here and now. Philosophy is important because it is the discipline which analyses concepts of personal identity and the ontological commitments coming along with them. Theology and religious sciences instead study biblical anthropology, God’s relation to mankind and how personal resurrection is related to divine action.

The project will be accomplished in three steps:

i) There will be a first conference in Obergurgl/Innsbruck (July 2008) on personal identity and resurrection treating a) science and immortality, b) philosophical approaches to post mortem survival and c) scholastic and modern theological models of resurrection.

ii) The second conference will be organised in Munich (March 2009) treating a) death and next world expectations in various cultural and religious systems (since early beginnings) and b) models of living beings in modern science and their relationship to ideas of immortality.

iii) There will be an essay competition entitled: “How to survive our death?” Personal Identity - Immortality - Resurrection. Prize winners will be invited to the symposium in Munich to receive their awards and to give a lecture publicly.