In his series of lectures, Flew focuses on the ideas of personal survival and personal immortality. His examination covers three common arguments which he labels as the ‘Reconstitutionist’, ‘Astral Body’, and ‘Platonic-Cartesian’. These ideas all affirm that the body will be remade by God. Concluding with an investigation of the realm of parapsychology, he asserts that we are irreducibly connected to our bodies, and the very best image of the soul is our human form.
Antony Garrard Newton Flew was born on 11 February 1923 in London. Ascribing to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, he contributed to the philosophy of religion. After serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, Flew became Lecturer in Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen in 1950, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Keele University in 1954. He moved to the University of Reading in 1973, and in 1982, he took up his final post as Professor of Philosophy at York University.
Vice-President of the Rationalist Press Association, Chairman of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, and Fellow of the Academy of Humanism, he was most noted for his atheism. However, his book, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (2007), sparked debate. Other notable works include Theology and Falsification (1950), Hume’s Philosophy of Belief (1961), God and Philosophy (1966), Evolutionary Ethics (1967), Thinking about Thinking (1975), The Presumption of Atheism (1976), and Atheistic Humanism (1993).
