Heavenly Immortality and the Plasticity of the Self

Abstract

I review the dispute between Ribeiro (2011) and Brown (2021) over whether the radical transformation which a human self would need to undergo in order to be heaven-admissible would be such that it leads to a loss of self. Ribeiro thinks it would; Brown thinks it wouldn’t. My primary intention here is to advance the debate by trying to better understand what’s in dispute between these disputants. From this better understanding of what’s in dispute, we can see what would be needed to substantively advance the debate, and one claim I defend here is that in order to substantively advance this debate, a disputant would need to have a compelling defense of his side’s view on (at least) one of the two main issues that my analysis herein identifies.