ABSTRACT
Life after bodily death might be finite, but most people who hope for an afterlife hope it will go on forever. For many people, what really matters about surviving death is having consciousness continue. Sometimes when people talk about life after death, they talk about the resurrection of the body. In some days of the Christian church, theologians spent a good deal of time trying to understand the idea of the resurrection of the body. Empirical arguments tend to rely on things like experiences that seem to be communications from the dead, out-of-body experiences, and near-death experiences. In the case of the Resurrection of Christ, the story at least begins with an intact body. In most cases, that won't be so. Notice that the body has no special role to play in David Hume's account of personal identity. It's also not central for Derek Parfit, nor was it for the Buddha.
