Grief is, and has always been, technologically supported. From memorials and shrines to photos and saved voicemail messages, we engage with the dead through the technologies available to us. As our technologies evolve, so does how we grieve. In this paper, we consider the role chatbots might play in our grieving practices. Influenced by recent phenomenological work, we begin by thinking about the character of grief. Next, we consider work on developing “continuing bonds” with the dead. We argue (...) that for some, chatbots may play an important role in establishing these continuing bonds by helping us develop what we term “habits of intimacy”. We then turn to the “ick factor” some may feel about this prospect, focusing especially on ethical concerns raised by Patrick Stokes and Adam Buben about the risk of replacing our dead with chatbots. We argue that replacement worries are not as pressing as Stokes and Buben suggest. We resist these replacement worries by appealing to the “thin reciprocity”, as we refer to it, that such bots offer, as well as the fictionalist stance that we think users of the bots adopt when engaging with them. We conclude by briefly raising some additional concerns and highlighting future research questions. (shrink)

Can metaphysics yield the consolations of philosophy? One possibility, defended by Derek Parfit, is that reflection on the nature of identity and time could diminish both fear of death and grief. In this paper, I assess the prospect of such consolation, focussing especially on attempts to console a grieving third party. A shift to a reductionist view of personal identity might mean that death is less threatening. However, there is some evidence to suggest that such a shift does not (...) necessarily translate into less death anxiety. Moreover, applied to grief at loss of another, such a perspective may be misdirected. A temporally neutral perspective offers a theoretically powerful way of reducing the sense of loss at being separated in time from a loved one. However, it is unclear whether it is psychologically possible to achieve. Even if it were possible, it may not diminish the pain of separation.I identify a serious challenge to philosophical consolation for grief. The greater the consolation that is offered, the greater the risk of losing important attachments and the less it may be psychologically accessible. (shrink)

Grief is a complex emotional experience or process, which is typically felt in response to the death of a loved one, most typically a family member, child, or partner. Yet the way in which grief manifests is much more complex than this. The things we grieve over are multiple and diverse. We may grieve for a former partner after the breakup of a relationship; parents sometimes report experiencing grief when their grown-up children leave the family home. We (...) can also experience grief for people we have never met. Indeed, it is not just persons that we may grieve for. People report feeling grief over the death of their pets, or about the destruction the natural environment. In all these cases one factor that seems to stand out is loss. Despite being about very different things, these various forms of grief all involve a loss of some sort. Yet there is a further aspect of grief, which, on the face of it, does not quite follow this pattern. Grief can also be experienced before a loss has occurred. Grief can be experienced while the person that one is grieving for is still living and before one has (fully) suffered the loss. This phenomenon is known as anticipatory grief. The experience of anticipatory grief is a complex phenomenon, which resists easy classification. Nonetheless, we suggest that mental time travel, our ability to mentally project ourselves into the personal past (episodic memory) and personal future (episodic prospection), is a key mechanism that underpins experiences of anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief can still be understood in terms of loss, but it is a loss that is brought to mind through memory and imagination. (shrink)

If mortality is the most important fact about us, then it is reasonable to think that fear of death is our most fundamental fear. Indeed, while philosophers continue to disagree about whether it is rational to fear death, they tend to assume that fear is the most common, natural response our mortality provokes. I neither want to deny the reality of this fear nor evaluate its rationality. Rather, drawing on Derrida’s remarks on ‘quasi-death’, I will argue that fearful or not, (...) death pervades everyday life; imagining one’s own death, and thereby remaining semi-present as a spectral observer, is not inherently misleading; and taking these imaginings seriously highlights another response we have toward our own mortality that is at least as significant as fear; namely, prospective, self-directed grief. (shrink)

Thanks to Gerry Hough for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

The prospect of death, for Confucians, creates particular social and familial duties. Short of end‐of‐life issues, children, as a matter of general filial duty, certainly have a duty to provide care and comfort for parents as they experience the limitations of old age. Death is a major theme of Zhuangzi. At various points in the text, we are counseled to embrace the inevitable, to detach ourselves from the desire to preserve life beyond its natural bounds. When a loved one dies, (...) however he or she has died, feelings of loss and grief naturally arise in those closest to the deceased. Confucianism believes that these emotions are the deepest wellsprings of humanity, the most fundamental sentiments of human love. Instead of denying grief, Confucius and Mencius tell us to cultivate it, to bring it into the center of our daily lives through conscientious mourning. (shrink)

Romanis and Adkins explore the near-term prospect of artificial amnion and placenta technology (AAPT) which is being developed to supplement the gestational process following the premature ending of a pregnancy.1 While fetal-centric narratives prevail in discussions surrounding AAPT, the authors subvert this trend by centering the experience of pregnant persons with respect to pregnancy loss. The overarching aim of their paper is to move beyond a ‘philosophical understanding of pregnancy towards practical-orientated conclusions regarding the care pathways surrounding [AAPT]’ (Romanis and (...) Adkins,1 p1). This commentary will critically examine the viability of this aim. Romanis and Adkins use the term ‘pregnancy loss’ to refer to the phenomenon where individuals experience a complex set of emotions following the premature ending of pregnancy, despite the survival of the gestated entity. Following Golish and Powell, the authors note how parents may experience contradictory emotions, such as joy mixed with grief, as well as a range of negative feelings including shame, disappointment and a sense of failure.2 At present, this phenomenon has been recognised among parents, particularly the (formerly) pregnant person, in the context of neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) when the infant survives preterm delivery and …. (shrink)

Canning, Raymond I was born on 15 September 1947. That same year, on 5 August, the International Council of Christians and Jews, meeting in Switzerland, had issued what have become known as 'The Ten Points of Seelisberg'.1 As grief and shame over the Shoah took root, the necessity for a radical change of theological, cultural and political attitudes on the part of Christians became clear. These Ten Points articulate key dimensions of that growing perception. They can therefore be understood (...) as forming an initial basis for the Christian-Jewish dialogue that was already gathering momentum.2 They also represent a first step in the process that led, eighteen years later, to Nostra Aetate, the document on the Catholic Church's relation to non-Christian religions that would emerge from the Second Vatican Council in late 1965. At various stages during the council years, it had appeared that the bishops' engagement with the new demands and manifold ramifications of Christian-Jewish relations expressed at Seelisberg might fail to produce any new official statement of Catholic Church teaching on the matter. Would the council after all remain silent on this crucial question? Yves Congar expressed the sentiments of many when, faced with this prospect in May 1965, he wrote in his council diary: 'For myself, however, I am in no way in favour of the pure and simple withdrawal of the text. Twenty years after Auschwitz it is impossible for the Council to say nothing'.3 And, as we now know, with the declaration Nostra Aetate the 'something' the council did succeed in saying, however small it may have appeared at that time, continues to resonate more than fifty years later. (shrink)

The emotions of guilt, shame, disappointment and grief, and the bodily states of pain and suffering, have something in common, at least phenomenologically: they are all unpleasant, they feel bad. But how might we explain what it is for some state to feel bad or unpleasant? What, in other words, is the nature of negative affect? In this paper I want to consider the prospects for evaluativist theories, which seek to explain unpleasantness by appeal to negative evaluations or appraisals. (...) In particular, I want to consider versions of evaluativism that seek to explain negative affect in terms of a kind of negative perceptual experience. These views thus attempt to explain feeling bad in terms of seeing bad. Now the most prominent evaluativist accounts of negative affect have been developed in the pain literature, and so my paper will primarily be focused on the question of whether evaluativism can provide a plausible account of the painfulness or unpleasantness of pain. I will argue that evaluativism faces serious objections on this score. Since my conclusions can be extended to cover negative affect more generally, however, we have good reason to reject evaluativist accounts of the negative affect involved in emotional experience. My arguments will thus have implications for those interested in the nature of emotional valence. I'll conclude with some brief remarks about the shape that a ‘relational’ account of painfulness in particular, and of negative affect in general, should take, in light of these criticisms of evaluativism. In my view, such views should appeal, not to negative evaluations to explain feeling bad, but to dislike. (shrink)

Includes 40 short reflections which address the ways in which we face the prospect of death and loss out of which the first 20 reflections are designed to be read by those living with a life-threatening illness; and the other 20 are reflections on living with grief, especially bereavement.

This paper explores the idea that mourning can help us to bear not only personal but also political losses. It focuses, in particular, on the proposal that legacies of racial loss and violence should be collectively mourned. I argue that Mamie Till Mobley was developing such a proposal in 1955, the year her son Emmett Till was lynched and in which she brought his body before all Americans, calling on them to look at it so that they might, together, say (...) what they had seen. Mobley’s proposal challenges what I take to be the leading rival position on the relationship of grief to political life, namely, that it is, at best, a catalyst for the achievement of political ends. But as I argue, Mobley’s proposal also raises challenges for present-day efforts to articulate a politics of loss, which are quick to assume either that such losses cannot be mourned collectively or that they have always been ours to mourn together. I will argue that these efforts have failed to take into account the insight behind Mobley’s invitation. My aim, in clarifying its significance, is to expand philosophical inquiry into the relationship between the emotions and political life and, more specifically, to contribute to an evaluation of the prospects for a mournful politics. (shrink)

The strongly resilient are able to quickly get over the loss of their beloved. This is not an entirely attractive capacity. In this paper, I argue that it is appropriate to be distressed about the fact that we might, quickly or slowly, get over the death of our loved ones. Moller argues that the principal problem with resilience is that it puts us in a defective epistemological position, one where we are no longer able to appreciate the significance of what (...) we have lost. Although I think this is a genuine concern, it does little to capture the source of our dismay at the prospect. The problem is not that not caring will make us blind to our beloved's past importance, but that we simply will no longer care for our beloved. The source of our dismay is captured nicely in a passage from Proust that Moller cites but quickly dismisses in two separate papers. My goal here is to defend something akin to the Proustian view that resilience amounts to a death of self. (shrink)

An engaging and illuminating exploration of grief—and why, despite its intense pain, it can also help us grow Experiencing grief at the death of a person we love or who matters to us—as universal as it is painful—is central to the human condition. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have rarely examined grief in any depth. In Grief, Michael Cholbi presents a groundbreaking philosophical exploration of this complex emotional event, offering valuable new insights about what grief is, whom (...) we grieve, and how grief can ultimately lead us to a richer self-understanding and a fuller realization of our humanity. Drawing on psychology, social science, and literature as well as philosophy, Cholbi explains that we grieve for the loss of those in whom our identities are invested, including people we don't know personally but cherish anyway, such as public figures. Their deaths not only deprive us of worthwhile experiences; they also disrupt our commitments and values. Yet grief is something we should embrace rather than avoid, an important part of a good and meaningful life. The key to understanding this paradox, Cholbi says, is that grief offers us a unique and powerful opportunity to grow in self-knowledge by fashioning a new identity. Although grief can be tumultuous and disorienting, it also reflects our distinctly human capacity to rationally adapt as the relationships we depend on evolve. An original account of how grieving works and why it is so important, Grief shows how the pain of this experience gives us a chance to deepen our relationships with others and ourselves. (shrink)

The widely accepted “continuing bonds” model of grief tells us that rather than bereavement necessitating the cessation of one’s relationship with the deceased, very often the relationship continues instead in an adapted form. However, this framework appears to conflict with philosophical approaches that treat reciprocity or mutuality of some form as central to loving relationships. Seemingly the dead cannot be active participants, rendering it puzzling how we should understand claims about continued relationships with them. In this article, we resolve (...) this tension by highlighting two fundamental aspects of paradigmatic loving relationships that can, and often do, continue in an adapted form following bereavement: love and mutual shaping of interests, choices, and self-concepts. Attention to these continuing features of relationships helps to capture and clarify the phenomenological and behavioral features of continuing bonds. However, love and mutual shaping must also change in important ways following bereavement. Love becomes unreciprocated, and although the dead continue to shape our interests, choices, and self-concepts, we predominantly shape their legacies and memories in return. These changes place important constraints upon the nature of our interpersonal connections with the dead. (shrink)

Prospect Theory: For Risk and Ambiguity, provides a comprehensive and accessible textbook treatment of the way decisions are made both when we have the statistical probabilities associated with uncertain future events and when we lack them. The book presents models, primarily prospect theory, that are both tractable and psychologically realistic. A method of presentation is chosen that makes the empirical meaning of each theoretical model completely transparent. Prospect theory has many applications in a wide variety of disciplines. The material in (...) the book has been carefully organized to allow readers to select pathways through the book relevant to their own interests. With numerous exercises and worked examples, the book is ideally suited to the needs of students taking courses in decision theory in economics, mathematics, finance, psychology, management science, health, computer science, Bayesian statistics, and engineering. (shrink)

Various claims have been made concerning the role of narrative in grief. In this paper, we emphasize the need for a discerning approach, which acknowledges that narratives of different kinds relate to grief in different ways. We focus specifically on the positive contributions that narrative can make to sustaining, restoring and revising a sense of who one is. We argue that, although it is right to suggest that narratives provide structure and coherence, they also play a complementary role (...) in disrupting established structure and opening up new possibilities. We add that both of these roles point to the importance of interpersonal, social and cultural factors in shaping the trajectory of grief. We conclude by briefly considering the implications for distinguishing between typical and pathological forms of grief. (shrink)

Grief is our emotional response to the deaths of intimates, and so like many other emotional conditions, it can be appraised in terms of its rationality. A philosophical account of grief's rationality should satisfy a contingency constraint, wherein grief is neither intrinsically rational nor intrinsically irrational. Here I provide an account of grief and its rationality that satisfies this constraint, while also being faithful to the phenomenology of grief experience. I begin by arguing against the (...) best known account of grief's rationality, Gustafson's strategic or forward-looking account, according to which the practical rationality of grief depends on the internal coherence of the component attitudes that explain the behaviors caused by grief, and more exactly, on how these attitudes enable the individual to realize states of affairs that she desires. While I do not deny that episodes of grief can be appraised in terms of their strategic rationality, I deny that strategic rationality is the essential or fundamental basis on which grief's rationality should be appraised. In contrast, the heart of grief's rationality is backward-looking. That is, what primarily makes an episode of grief rational qua grief is the fittingness of the attitudes individuals take toward the experience of a lost relationship, attitudes which in turn generate the desires and behaviors that constitute bereavement. Grief thus derives its essential rationality from the objects it responds to, not from the attitudes causally downstream from that response, and is necessarily irrational when the behaviors that constitute an individual's grieving are inappropriate to the object of that grief. So while the strategic rationality of an episode of grief contributes to whether it is on the whole rational, no episode of grief can be rational unless the actions that constitute grieving accurately gauge the change in a person's normative situation wrought by the loss of her relationship with the deceased. (shrink)

Grief is often thought of as an emotional response to the death of someone we love. However, the term “grief” is also used when referring to losses of various other kinds, as with grief over illness, injury, unemployment, diminished abilities, relationship breakups, or loss of significant personal possessions. Complementing such uses, we propose that grief over a bereavement and other experiences of loss share a common phenomenological structure: one experiences the loss of certain possibilities that were (...) integral to—and perhaps central to—the unfolding structure of one’s life. Grief can thus be conceived of in a broad but still univocal way. To develop this position, we focus on the example of grief over involuntary childlessness, where lack of a concrete, historical object of emotion serves to make explicit the way in which grief concerns future possibilities. We go on to suggest that the phenomenological complexity, diversity, and prevalence of grief are obscured when approached via an abstract, simplified conception of bereavement. -/- . (shrink)

Imagine that someone recovers relatively quickly, say, within two or three months, from grief over the death of her spouse, whom she loved and who loved her; and suppose that, after some brief interval, she remarries. Does the fact that she feels better and moves on relatively quickly somehow diminish the quality of her earlier relationship? Does it constitute a failure to do well by the person who died? Our aim is to respond to two arguments that give affirmative (...) answers to these questions. The first argument, which is developed by Dan Moller in “Love and Death”, states that recovering relatively quickly from grief over the deaths of people who are close to us is deeply regrettable, in one respect, because it means that these people were relatively unimportant to us. The second, which derives from some classic literary discussions of grief, states that such a recovery is regrettable because it amounts to abandoning the person who died. Responding to these arguments promises to dissolve certain anxieties about whether we do well by the people we love when they die. Beyond this, it promises to help us better understand what it means to cultivate good relationships with these people during their lives. (shrink)

Griefbots are chatbots designed to assist individuals in coping with the loss of a loved one by offering a digital replica of the departed. Navigating grief is a deeply transformative and vulnerable journey intricately tied to one's well-being. Do griefbots aid in the grieving process, or do they complicate it? To address these questions, this article blends insights from philosophy and neuroscience to explore the nature of grief as a means to clarify the ethical dimensions surrounding the use (...) of griefbots. (shrink)

Because an increasing number of patients have medical conditions that render them incompetent at making their own medical choices, more and more medical choices are now made by surrogates, often patient family members. However, many studies indicate that surrogates often do not discharge their responsibilities adequately, and in particular, do not choose in accordance with what those patients would have chosen for themselves, especially when it comes to end-of-life medical choices. This chapter argues that a significant part of the explanation (...) of such surrogate failure is that family surrogates are likely to undergo anticipatory grief when making end-of-life decisions. After clarifying both the emotional structure and object of grief, I propose that the pending death of a loved one induces an emotional conflict in surrogates between the care demanded by their responsibility as surrogates and the attachment surrogates feel toward their dying loved one, an attachment surrogates "resolve" in the direction of attachment rather than care. This hypothesis helps to explain both surrogates' general inability to exercise "substituted judgment" on behalf of their loved ones and a wide swath of the particular data regarding this inability (e.g., that surrogates more often err by choosing overtreatment). I conclude by considering possible clinical and philosophical responses to this hypothesis. (shrink)

Grief research in philosophy agrees that one who grieves grieves over the irreversible loss of someone whom the griever loved deeply, and that someone thus factored centrally into the griever’s sense of purpose and meaning in the world. The analytic literature in general tends to focus its treatments on the paradigm case of grief as the death of a loved one. I want to restrict my account to the paradigm case because the paradigm case most persuades the mind (...) that grief is a past-directed emotion. The phenomenological move I propose will enable us to (1) respect the paradigm case of grief and a broader but still legitimate set of grief-generating states of affairs, (2) liberate grief from the view that grief is past directed or about the past, and thus (3) account for grief in a way that separates it from its closest emotion-neighbor, sorrow, without having to rely on the affective quality of those two emotions.If the passing of the beloved causes the grief but is not what the grief is about, then we can get at the nature of grief by saying its temporal orientation is in the past (the event of the passing), but its temporal meaning is the present and future—the new significance of a world with the pervasive absence that is the world without the beloved. The no-longer of grief is a no-longer oriented by a past (that which is no longer) that is referred a present and future (that which is a no-longer understood as not now as it once was). Looking at the griever’s relation to time can tell us much about the pain and the object of grief, then. As the griever puts the past before himself with a certainty about this world “henceforth,” a look at the griever’s lived sense of the fi nality of the irreversibly lost (1) liberates grief from the tendency in the literature to be reduced to a past-directed emotion, (2) accounts for grief ’s intensity, its affective force or poignancy, and thus (3) enables us to separate grief from sorrow according to its intentionalobject in light of the temporal meaning of these emotions. (shrink)

Is grief a “negative” emotion? Is it an emotion at all? We often tend to conflate what causes an emotion with the value of the emotion itself. I argue that grief plays an unappreciated positive role in our experience. I also suggest that we too often tend to think of emotions as distinctive feelings and not as processes, but grief is a clear case of an emotional process. I similarly suggest that gratitude is an unappreciated emotion in (...) ethics. But, on a cosmic level, there is some question who the grateful person is grateful to. (shrink)

Grief seems difficult to locate within familiar emotion taxonomies, as it not a basic emotion nor a hybrid thereof. Here I propose that grief is better conceptualized as an emotionally rich attentional phenomenon rather than an emotion or sequence of emotions. In grieving, that another person has died, the loss incurred by the grieving, etc., occupy the forefront of the grieving subject’s consciousness while other candidate facts for their attention recede into the background. The former set of facts (...) thus sist near the top of their mental “priority structures” throughout a grief event. The hypothesis that grief is attentional helps to explain several common phenomenological features of grief experience, underpins a credible ‘metaphysics’ of grief, accounts for the extent to which grief is susceptible to choice and agency, and addresses a recent puzzle regarding our reasons to grieve and our apparent proclivity toward ‘resilience’ in the face of grief. (shrink)

Grief is not a kind of feeling, or a kind of judgement, or a kind of perception, or any kind of mental state or event the identity of which can be adequately captured at a moment in time. Instead, grief is a kind of process; more specifically, it is a complex pattern of activity and passivity, inner and outer, which unfolds over time, and the unfolding pattern over time is explanatorily prior to what is the case at any (...) particular time. The pattern of a particular grieving is best understood and explained through a narrative account, and not merely through a causal account, for narrative accounts in such cases have powerful explanatory, revelatory, and expressive powers which causal accounts lack. Although I will not argue for it here, I believe that this view of grief can be generalised to other kinds of emotion. If this is so, then many philosophical accounts of emotion are at fault in identifying emotion with a kind of mental state or event. (shrink)

This paper seeks to develop a phenomenological account of the disorientation of grief, specifically the relationship between disorientation and the breakdown in practical self-understanding at the heart of grief. I argue that this breakdown cannot be sufficiently understood as a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space that leaves the bereaved individual at a loss as to how to go on. Examining the experience of losing a loved person and a loved person-to-be, I (...) instead propose that this breakdown should be understood primarily in relation to a distinctive kind of futurity operative in disorientation,irrespectiveof the extent to which there is a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space. Drawing on the resources afforded by Heidegger’s phenomenology, I argue that it is acore characteristicof the experience of disorientation in grief that the grieving person can no longer meaningfully press ahead into aspecific futural self. This view comes with certain advantages over existing accounts of the temporality of grief for making sense of the disorientated relationship to futurity, which the appeal to Heideggerian resources makes possible. (shrink)

Grief is often described as characterized by a particular emotional response to another person’s death. While this is true of paradigm cases, we argue that a broader notion of grief allows accommodating forms of this emotional experience that deviate from the paradigmatic case. The bulk of the paper explores such a nonparadigmatic form of grief, anticipatory-vicarious grief, which is typically triggered by pondering the inevitability of our own death. We argue that AV-grief is a particular (...) moral emotion that serves a unique function and is indissolubly linked to the practical identities of human agents. An agent’s AV-grief is about the harm that occurs to individuals whose practical identities depend on the agent. (shrink)

3856 references to literature on death, grief, and bereavement. For the most part, English-language materials. Excludes journalistic, literary, and theological works, as well as, generally, works on suicide. Alphabetical arrangement by primary authors. Entries include bibliographical information. Subject index.

:In this essay, I consider a particular version of the thesis that the blameworthy deserve to suffer, namely, that they deserve to feel guilty to the proper degree. Two further theses have been thought to explicate and support the thesis, one that appeals to the non-instrumental goodness of the blameworthy receiving what they deserve, and the other that appeals to the idea that being blameworthy provides reason to promote the blameworthy receiving what they deserve. I call the first "Good-Guilt" and (...) the second "Reason-Guilt.” I begin by exploring what I take to be the strongest argument for Good-Guilt which gains force from a comparison of guilt and grief, and the strongest argument against. I conclude that Good-Guilt might be true, but that even if it is, the strongest argument in favor of it fails to support it in a way that provides reason for the thesis that the blameworthy deserve to feel guilty. I then consider the hypothesis that Reason-Guilt might be true and might be the more fundamental principle, supporting both Good-Guilt and Desert-Guilt. I argue that it does not succeed, however, and instead propose a different principle, according to which being blameworthy does not by itself provide reason for promoting that the blameworthy get what they deserve, but that being blameworthy systematically does so in conjunction with particular kinds of background circumstances. Finally, I conclude that Desert-Guilt might yet be true, but that it does not clearly gain support from either Good-Guilt or Reason-Guilt. (shrink)

This paper seeks to develop a phenomenological account of the disorientation of grief, specifically the relationship between disorientation and the breakdown in practical self-understanding at the heart of grief. I argue that this breakdown cannot be sufficiently understood as a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space that leaves the bereaved individual at a loss as to how to go on. Examining the experience of losing a loved person and a loved person-to-be, I (...) instead propose that this breakdown should be understood primarily in relation to a distinctive kind of futurity operative in disorientation, irrespective of the extent to which there is a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space. Drawing on the resources afforded by Heidegger’s phenomenology, I argue that it is a core characteristic of the experience of disorientation in grief that the grieving person can no longer meaningfully press ahead into a specific futural self. This view comes with certain advantages over existing accounts of the temporality of grief for making sense of the disorientated relationship to futurity, which the appeal to Heideggerian resources makes possible. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to bring into view an ethical task that we face when grieving the loss of a loved one. That task is to see the independent reality of the lost other. I shall do so through a reading of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. I shall try to show that Lewis’s struggle to see the independent reality of his wife, Joy, provides an important, and troubling, insight into what it means for us to (...) grieve well. Lewis’s account forces us to reflect on a key, but largely overlooked, assumption in contemporary philosophical accounts of grief, namely, that we do indeed see the independent reality of the lost other. Lewis’s account reveals that the struggle to see the lost other is at the same time a struggle to escape deeply-rooted aspects of the self. (shrink)

The philosophy of grief has directed little attention to bereavement’s impact on perceptual experience. However, misperceptions, hallucinations and other anomalous experiences are strikingly common following the death of a loved one. Such experiences range from misperceiving a stranger to be the deceased, to phantom sights, sounds and smells, to nebulous quasi-sensory experiences of the loved one’s presence. This paper draws upon the enactive sensorimotor theory of perception to offer a phenomenologically sensitive and empirically informed account of these experiences. It (...) argues that they can be understood as deriving from disruption to both sensorimotor expectations and perceived opportunities for action, stemming from the upheaval of bereavement. Different facets of the enactive sensorimotor approach can help to explain different types of post-bereavement perceptual experience. Post-bereavement misperceptions can be accounted for through the way that alterations to sensorimotor expectations can result in atypical ‘amodal completion’, while bereavement hallucinations can be understood as ‘appearances’ that fail to form part of the usual patterns of sensorimotor contingency. Quasi-sensory experiences of the presence of the deceased can be understood as resulting from changes to perceived affordances. This paper aims to demonstrate the explanatory value of key aspects of the sensorimotor approach by highlighting how they can help to explain the phenomenology of post-bereavement experiences. However, it also illuminates certain areas in which the sensorimotor approach ought to be supplemented, especially if it is to account for tight connections between perception, affect, and intersubjectivity that are salient in grief. (shrink)

Quietist Moral Realists accept that there are moral facts and properties, while aiming to avoid many of the explanatory burdens thought to fall on traditional moral realists. This chapter examines the forms that Quietist Moral Realism has taken and the challenges it has faced, in order to better assess its prospects. The best hope, this chapter argues, lies in a pragmatist approach that distinguishes the different functions of diverse areas of discourse. This paves the way for a form of Quietism (...) that does not simply remain quiet about the explanatory demands of metaethics, but rather is able to diagnose where they go wrong. By combining a neopragmatic analysis of the discourse with an easy approach to ontology, , we can develop a form of Quietist Moral Realism that is far stronger than critics of quietism have appreciated. (shrink)

“Deathbots,” digital constructs that emulate the conversational patterns, demeanor, and knowledge of deceased individuals. Earlier moral discussions about deathbots centered on the dignity and autonomy of the deceased. This paper primarily examines the potential psychological and emotional dependencies that users might develop towards deathbots, considering approaches to prevent problematic dependence through temporary use. We adopt a hermeneutic method to argue that deathbots, as they currently exist, are unlikely to provide substantial comfort. Lacking the capacity to bear emotional burdens, they fall (...) short of meeting idealistic expectations. By repositioning deathbots, we aim to mitigate the risk of emotional dependency and respect the natural grieving process. Our goal is to propose the use of deathbots as a novel means of mourning through transitory use, rather than as a method to alleviate grief or as a patterns for communication with the deceased. (shrink)

Disturbances to one's sense of self, the feeling that one has ‘lost a part of oneself’ or that one ‘no longer feels like oneself,’ are frequently recounted throughout the bereavement literature. Engaging Allan Køster's important contribution to this issue, this article reinforces his suggestion that, by rupturing the existential texture of self-familiarity, bereavement can result in experiences of estrangement that can be meaningfully understood according to the concept of self-alienation. Nevertheless, I suggest that whilst Køster's relational interpretation of alienation as (...) the withdrawal of heteronomy can be applied to the experience of world-collapse in bereavement, what sets bereavement apart from other limit situations is the fact that it involves an intersubjective relation between the living and the dead. In contrast to Køster, therefore, I suggest that the experience of self-alienation that is distinctive to bereavement results from the fact that the bereaved is exposed to, and co-opted by, the absolute alterity of death itself. (shrink)

Articles in the popular media and testimonies collected in empirical work suggest that many people who have not been bereaved have nevertheless grieved over pandemic-related losses of various kinds. There is a philosophical question about whether any experience of a non-death loss ought to count as grief, hinging upon how the object of grief is construed. However, even if one accepts that certain significant non-death losses are possible targets of grief, many reported cases of putative pandemic-related (...) class='Hi'>grief may appear less plausible. For instance, it might be argued that many of these losses are temporary or minor and therefore unlikely to be grieved, and that the associated experiences are phenomenologically dissimilar to grief. In this article, as well as discussing the more general question about the coherence of the idea of non-bereavement grief, we address these obstacles to taking reports of pandemic non-bereavement grief to be literal and true. In particular, we argue that some may have experienced grief over even apparently minor losses during the pandemic. This is generally so, we suggest, only insofar as experiences of such losses form part of an overarching grief process directed at some broader significant loss. Thus, we cast light on both the nature of non-bereavement grief and the kinds of disruption and loss experienced during the pandemic. (shrink)

The Stoic rejection of the passion of grief strikes many ethicists writing on dying as inhuman, selfish, or lacking appreciation for the world. This essay argues that Stoics rejected grief and the fear of death because these passions alienated one from the present through sorrow or anxiety for the future, disrupting one's ability to fulfill obligations of care for others and to feel gratitude for the gift of loved ones. Early Christian writers on death, such as Ambrose, maintained (...) much of the substance of Stoic doctrine but transformed it through their belief in the resurrection and their corresponding revaluation of the future. While these writers rejected grief as an affective response to death, they affirmed longing for lost loved ones. These authors provide an example of how contemporary religious ethicists can use Stoic insights for recovering the tradition of the art of dying. (shrink)

In Grief: A Philosophical Guide, Michael Cholbi characterizes grief as a “questioning attitude”; it calls attention to and prompts questions about the significance of the departed specifically to the griever. Accordingly, Cholbi assigns grief a largely self-directed cognitive purpose: grief’s goodness is that it leads—when things go well—to greater self-knowledge. In this paper, I question this claim. Calling upon an ordinary episode of grief, I argue that there are at least a few cases of (...) class='Hi'>grief in which greater self-knowledge is neither likely nor reasonably expected. (shrink)

The philosophy of grief has directed little attention to bereavement’s impact on perceptual experience. However, misperceptions, hallucinations and other anomalous experiences are strikingly common following the death of a loved one. Such experiences range from misperceiving a stranger to be the deceased, to phantom sights, sounds and smells, to nebulous quasi-sensory experiences of the loved one’s presence. This paper draws upon the enactive sensorimotor theory of perception to offer a phenomenologically sensitive and empirically informed account of these experiences. It (...) argues that they can be understood as deriving from disruption to both sensorimotor expectations and perceived opportunities for action, stemming from the upheaval of bereavement. Different facets of the enactive sensorimotor approach can help to explain different types of post-bereavement perceptual experience. Post-bereavement misperceptions can be accounted for through the way that alterations to sensorimotor expectations can result in atypical ‘amodal completion’, while bereavement hallucinations can be understood as ‘appearances’ that fail to form part of the usual patterns of sensorimotor contingency. Quasi-sensory experiences of the presence of the deceased can be understood as resulting from changes to perceived affordances. This paper aims to demonstrate the explanatory value of key aspects of the sensorimotor approach by highlighting how they can help to explain the phenomenology of post-bereavement experiences. However, it also illuminates certain areas in which the sensorimotor approach ought to be supplemented, especially if it is to account for tight connections between perception, affect, and intersubjectivity that are salient in grief. (shrink)

The world as we currently know it is troubled by climate change, leaving a marked trace in our affective landscape, for example, in the form of shame, anger, and depression. This affective landscape needs further philosophical exploration, and in this paper I use analyses by Aristotle, Heidegger, and Butler to discuss anxiety and grief. I focus on these two affects because they a) often collaborate in times of ecological destruction, and b) can be distinguished in terms of short-term intentional (...) “emotions” and as long-term, atmospheric “moods.” Due to their temporal and atmospheric flexibility, these affects gain particular traction in relating to the deep-time timescale of the Anthropocene. At the end of the paper, I discuss trust, since the affective constellation of long-term atmospheric anxiety and grief can become especially productive when combined with the safety of trust, in that such constellation may enable constructive transformations building environmentally sustainable futures. (shrink)

The expression «the grief willed by God» in 2Cor 7:10 posed a problem for monastic writers who were also drawing upon the Stoic tradition of the four disordered passions . This essay examines three treatments of the Pauline expression by Evagrius Ponticus, Diadochus of Photice, and Maximus the Confessor, who strove to interpret 'grief' as both a vice and a virtue . While Evagarius establishes the basic understanding of «the grief willed by God» as a stimulus for (...) repentance, Maximus the Confessor offers a more radical interpretation of grief as a unifying experience of the Communion of Saints. (shrink)

The paper considers various ruminations on the aftermath of the death of a close one, and the processes of grieving and mourning. The conceptual examination of how grief impacts on its sufferers, from different cultural perspectives, is followed by an analytical survey of current thinking among psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers on the enigma of grief, and on the associated practice of mourning. Robert C. Solomon reflected deeply on the 'extreme emotion' of grief in his extensive theorizing on (...) the emotions, particularly in his essay 'On Grief and Gratitude', commenting that grief is 'often described as a very private, personal emotion, characterized by social withdrawal and shutting oneself off from the world' (2004: 73). While dialoguing with the spirit of Solomon by way also of a tribute to his immense insights, the paper engages in critical reflections on recent thinking in this area elsewhere - notably, in Heidegger, Freud, Nussbaum, Casey, Gustafson, and Kristeva - and offers a refreshing critique toward an alternative to the received wisdom. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge in philosophical work on the rationality of grief. Much of this research is premised on the idea that people tend to grieve much less than would be appropriate or, as it is often called, fitting. My goal in this paper is diagnostic, that is, to articulate two never properly distinguished, and indeed often conflated, arguments in favour of the purported discrepancy between experienced and fitting grief: a metaphysical and a psychological argument. According (...) to the former, grief is rationalized entirely by facts about the past. And because the past is unchangeable, grief can be said to remain forever fitting. According to the latter argument, humans’ emotional resilience causes grief to diminish at a faster rate than would be fitting. Which of these problems we end up facing depends on relatively subtle variations in the characterization of the losses that render grief appropriate. (shrink)

Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity is a landmark contribution that provides fresh insights into the experience and process of mourning. It includes fourteen original essays by pre-eminent psychoanalysts, historians, classicists, theologians, architects, art-historians and artists, that take on the subject of normal, rather than pathological mourning. In particular, it considers the diversity of the mourning process; the bereavement of ordinary vs. extraordinary loss; the contribution of mourning to personal and creative growth; and individual, social, and cultural means (...) of transcending grief. The book is divided into three parts, each including two to four essays followed by one or two critical discussions. Co-editor _Adele Tutter’s_ Prologue outlines the salient themes and tensions that emerge from the volume. Part I juxtaposes the consideration of grief in antiquity with an examination of the contemporary use of memorials to facilitate communal remembrance. Part II offers intimate first-person accounts of mourning from four renowned psychoanalysts that challenge long-held psychoanalytic formulations of mourning. Part III contains deeply personal essays that explore the use of sculpture, photography, and music to withstand, mourn, and transcend loss on individual, cultural and political levels. Drawing on the humanistic wisdom that underlies psychoanalytic thought, co-editor _Léon Wurmser’s_ Epilogue closes the volume. Grief and its Transcendence will be a must for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and scholars within other disciplines who are interested in the topics of grief, bereavement and creativity. (shrink)

This paper argues that grieving a profound loss is a transformative experience, specifically an unchosen transformative experience, understood as an event‐based transformation not chosen by the agent. Grief transforms the self (i) cognitively, by forcing the agent to alter a large set of beliefs and desires, (ii) phenomenologically, by altering their experience in a diffuse or global manner, (iii) normatively, by requiring the agent to revise their practical identity, and (iv) existentially, by confronting the agent with a structuring condition (...) of their life. Grief is a disruption to one's identity that an agent addresses by making sense of the world after the loss, remaking the practical significance of various situations in their lives through their activity. Transformative grief is both an “activity” and a “revelation” (Callard, 2020): Some parts of the grieving process are active (the agent must actively work to become a new kind of person), while others are irreducibly passive (the agent passively undergoes them). (shrink)

Objective: Losing the only child is considered as the most severe kind of bereavement. It can trigger intense grief symptoms along with loss of psychosocial resources, but meanwhile, it can also lead to posttraumatic growth (PTG). The current study aimed to examine (a) whether a curvilinear relationship exists between grief and PTG, and (b) the moderating role of resources-loss among Chinese bereaved parents who lost their only child (shidu parents). Methods: 199 shidu parents from five provinces completed the (...) assessment packet covering prolonged grief symptoms and PTG, as well as resource loss. Hierarchical regression analyses were computed to examine the curvilinear relationship and the moderating effect of interpersonal loss and socio-economic loss. Results: There was no significant curvilinear relationship between grief and PTG in shidu parents. Under the high levels of interpersonal loss, shidu parents’ PTG scores decreased as the severity of grief increased. However, the socio-economic loss did not show a significant moderating effect. Conclusion: The results of the current study did not show a significant curvilinear relationship between grief and PTG in shidu parents. High levels of grief coupled with high levels of interpersonal loss may interfere with their ability to achieve PTG. Therefore, evaluating degrees of interpersonal loss seems to be an important part of the treatment process when working with shidu parents. To facilitate their adaptation from a positive perspective, helping them maintain existing or develop new interpersonal relationships may be helpful. (shrink)