A Life Without End is a fictional portrayal of Stan Miller, a man with a lifelong yearning for an afterlife that began as a child when his beloved pet dog died unexpectedly and he was too young to properly comprehend its death. Despite finding and marrying the woman of his dreams, raising a family, and establishing himself as a respected college biology professor, the finality and universality of death continued to haunt him throughout his entire life, triggering an exploration of several major religions, psychotherapy, and finally, science, all in quest of somehow eluding death and achieving immortality, or at least a greatly extended life span. In his early sixties, Stan develops a fatal disease (ALS) and, despite his wifes many (thoughtful) reservations, ultimately decides to have his body cryonically preserved (frozen). He is returned to life sixty-one years later (in the year 2068) after a cure is found for his disease and discovers a very different world where the altered nature of human relationships are even more difficult to comprehend than the baffling technology surrounding him.

It was early Spring in 1979 when a friend of mine told me he was driving up a mountain road towards the summit. He said he had no idea what he was doing or where he was going. He had gotten into the car and just started to drive. He was just trying to get away from all his troubles. Many of us have gone through this kind of thing in our lives. Just packing up and getting away from it all. I can think of a couple of times I have wanted to do the same thing. Life can be unbearable, to the point of getting away from it. Or even ending it. Life is not a smooth ride. When we think of life without end that can sound terrible if you are living a life full of troubles. We want to think that when we die we just stop, and that's it. Everything just ends. We think it is like going to sleep and we rest from life's troubles. That's a nice thought, but I am afraid it is not reality. Everyone has their own opinion on what happens after death, but that's what it is. An Opinion! Facts have not entered the picture. What I am about to do is look at the subject of death and life and I put them in this order because that is the way it is. Most people look at it the opposite, we are alive and then we die, but when you look at it in the right order it starts to make sense. Now I don't want to get ahead of myself so let us hold that thought until later. Now that you have an idea on what we are going to look at, and if you have an interest in this subject, let us move on.

A groundbreaking study examining major literary treatments of the idea of earthly immortality, throwing into relief fascinating instances of human self-awareness over the past three hundred years.

In Connectivity a retired bureaucrat's telephone line is accidentally connected to that of a grieving man s, while a heart surgeon helps his patient across the great abyss in Song without End . The skilful grooming of a poet is described in A Lane in Lucknow, and a senile old nawab finds himself a stranger to an altered world in The Taste of Almonds . In Through the Looking Glass a man losing his sight finds he can get to the heart of all the books in his library by an inexplicable miracle, and in Play the roles an actor enacts are a source of important life lessons.

Boethius composed the Consolatio Philosophiae in the sixth century AD whilst awaiting death under torture. He had been condemned on a charge of treason which he protested was manifestly unjust. Though a convinced Christian, in detailing the true end of life which is the soul's knowledge ofGod, he consoled himself not with Christian precepts but with the tenets of Greek philosophy. This work dominated the intellectual world of the Middle Ages; writers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, Jean de Meun, and Dante were inspired by it. In England it was rendered into Old English by Alfred theGreat, into Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer, and later Queen Elizabeth I made her own translation. The circumstances of composition, the heroic demeanour of the author, and the `Menippean' texture (part prose, part verse; Boethius was a considerable poet) have combined to exercise a fascinationover students of philosophy and of literature ever since. Professor Walsh has included an introduction and explanatory notes which combined with his new translation make the text accessible to general readers and scholars alike.

The philosophical significance of place—in Heidegger's work and as the focus of a distinctive mode of philosophical thinking. The idea of place—topos—runs through Martin Heidegger's thinking almost from the very start. It can be seen not only in his attachment to the famous hut in Todtnauberg but in his constant deployment of topological terms and images and in the situated, “placed” character of his thought and of its major themes and motifs. Heidegger's work, argues Jeff Malpas, exemplifies the practice of “philosophical topology.” In Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, Malpas examines the topological aspects of Heidegger's thought and offers a broader elaboration of the philosophical significance of place. Doing so, he provides a distinct and productive approach to Heidegger as well as a new reading of other key figures—notably Kant, Aristotle, Gadamer, and Davidson, but also Benjamin, Arendt, and Camus. Malpas, expanding arguments he made in his earlier book Heidegger's Topology (MIT Press, 2007), discusses such topics as the role of place in philosophical thinking, the topological character of the transcendental, the convergence of Heideggerian topology with Davidsonian triangulation, the necessity of mortality in the possibility of human life, the role of materiality in the working of art, the significance of nostalgia, and the nature of philosophy as beginning in wonder. Philosophy, Malpas argues, begins in wonder and begins in place and the experience of place. The place of wonder, of philosophy, of questioning, he writes, is the very topos of thinking.