The aim of Scheffler’s study is to assess the assumptions required for us to sustain our confidence in the value and worth of our lives. Scheffler defends the claim that “our confidence that there will be a collective afterlife is, to a much greater extent than a confidence that there will be a personal afterlife, a condition of other things mattering to us here and now.” In a decade when so much philosophy is “academic” and “narrow” (i.e. dry, dull, arcane, etc.), Scheffler’s engagement with a large issue that is of general human importance is refreshing.