[3] Scheffler received his PhD from Princeton University, where he was a student of the philosopher Thomas Nagel.
As the Princeton philosopher Mark Johnston explained in Boston Review: In Scheffler's self-consciously idiosyncratic use of the term, the "afterlife" is neither a supernatural continuation of this life, nor the result of a deeper naturalistic understanding of the kind of thing we are; it is what John Stuart Mill called "the onward rush of mankind," the collective life of humanity after our individual deaths.
Scheffler's thesis is that the onward rush of humankind – the collective afterlife – is much more important to us than we are ordinarily apt to notice.
[6] Assessing the argument, the English philosopher John Cottingham wrote: "Scheffler has produced a superb essay – indeed it seems to me about as good as analytic philosophy gets.
It is entirely free from obfuscating jargon and other tiresome tricks of the trade, yet it is meticulously argued and demanding in exactly the right way – forcing us to think about hitherto unexamined implications of our existing beliefs.