SF-1169 Immortality: Real and Imagined
Most of the world's religious traditions have as a part of their doctrines some notion of immortality, rendered both in scriptures as well as iconographically. What precisely is entailed by immortality and why does it constitute such a significant element of so many religious traditions? What can we learn about immortality by investigating various conceptions of the afterlife? Is immortality truly a desirable thing? These questions among others will be examined from the perspectives of philosophy, religion, psychology, anthropology, and biology. Besides being cross-disciplinary, the course will be multi-media in nature. In addition to reading philosophical and religious texts concerning the nature of immortality, students will study various accounts of immortality and the afterlife, examine how the afterlife has been dealt with in (visual) art, literature, and film, and investigate current research into life prolongation (biomedical gerontology).