Abstract

This chapter is a philosophical exploration of the topic specifically sidestepped in Patočka’s paper: the survival of the soul after the death of the body. First, I summarise arguments by some philosophers of religion (such as D Z Phillips) who offer a position analogous to that of Patočka: that the immortality of the soul should not be understood literally (ontologically), for that might be confused, but rather in a Platonic sense as the matter of a life lived in the light of absolute moral concerns. However, I further argue that this appears insufficient to make sense of the multiple examples of the contacts with the dead or the spirits, rooted in rich situated practices of cultures and religions (rather than in confused metaphysics of academic philosophers). Here, the explicit rejections of ontological commitments as “confused” may amount to failing to do justice to the terms in which observers of a religion, but also bereaved people, understand their own experiences and in which these experiences are conceptualised in the lives of the broad social practices (including religious practices in a narrower sense). Here, I am following some insights achieved by the recent “ontological turn” in (the philosophy of) social sciences.