Like many people nowadays, though unlike many others, I do not believe in the existence of an afterlife as normally understood. That is, I do not believe that individuals continue to live on as conscious beings after their biological deaths. To the contrary, I believe that biological death represents the final and irrevocable end of an individual’s life. In this lecture, therefore, I will not be arguing for the existence of the afterlife as it is normally understood. At the same time, however, I (usually) take it for granted that other human beings will continue to live on after my own death. In this rather non-standard sense, I take it for granted that there will be an afterlife: that others will continue to live after I have died. I believe that most of us take this for granted, and my aim is to investigate the role of this assumption in our lives. It is my contention that the existence of an afterlife, in my non-standard sense of the term, matters greatly to us. It matters in its own right,
and it matters because our confidence in the existence of an afterlife is a condition of many other things that we care about continuing to matter to us. If this is correct, it reveals some surprising features of our attitudes toward the future, toward the things that we value, and toward our own deaths.