Our goal is to provide a comprehensive list of philosophical works that either focus on grief or include a substantial amount of material on grief. This bibliography is a work in progress and will be added to over the course of the project. Please email us with any suggestions for additional sources. 

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Grief: A Bibliographical Resource

Phenomenology
Presence & Absence
Epistemology of Mind
​Rationality, desires and judgments Rationality and temporal orientation Self-knowledge Resilience
Philosophy of Emotion ​
  • ​Gustafson, D. (1989). Grief. Noûs, 23(4), 457–479.
  • Lyons, W. (1980) Emotion. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
  • Nussbaum, M. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Grief and Narrative
  • Goldie, P. (2011). Grief: a narrative account. Ratio, XXIV(2), 119–137.
  • Goldie, P. (2012.) The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Higgins, K. (2012) Bob on Meaning in Life and Death. In K. Higgins and D. Sherman (Eds.) Passion, Death, and Spirituality: The Philosophy of Robert C. Solomon (pp. 259-267). Dordrecht: Springer.
  • Higgins, K. (2013). Love and death. In J. Deigh (Ed.), On emotions: Philosophical essays (pp. 159–178). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Ingerslev, L. R. (2018). Ongoing: On Grief’s Open-Ended Rehearsal. Continental Philosophy Review, 51(3), 343-360.
  • Ratcliffe, M. (2017). Grief and the Unity of Emotion. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XLI, 154-174 https://doi.org/10.1111/misp.12071
  • Solomon, R. (2008). True to Our Feelings. (Oxford: Oxford University Press). pp. 76–77.
Social painAnticipatory grief
  • Cholbi, M. (2017). Grief and End-of-life Surrogate Decision Making. In J. K. Davis (ed.), Ethics at the End of Life: New Issues and Arguments. New York: Routledge. pp. 201-217
  • Varga, S. & Gallagher, S. (2020). Anticipatory-Vicarious Grief: The Anatomy of a Moral Emotion. The Monist, 103(2), 176–189. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onz034
The expression and perception of grief
  • Stout, R. (2012). What someone's behavior must be like if we are to be aware of their emotions in it. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), 135–48.
Interpersonal experience
​Grief and Social Cognition
  • ​Ratcliffe, M. (2016) Relating to the Dead: Social Cognition and the Phenomenology of Grief. In T. Szanto & D. Moran, (Eds.), Phenomenology of Sociality (Chapter 12). New York: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315688268
Continuing Bonds
  • Køster, A. (2019). Longing for concreteness: how body memory matters to continuing bonds. Mortality, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2019.1632277
  • Køster, A. (2020). The felt sense of the other: contours of a sensorium. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
  • Scrutton, A. P. (2017). Grief, Ritual and Experiential Knowledge: A Philosophical Perspective. In D. Klass and E. M. Steffen (Eds.), Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: New Directions for Research and Practice. The Series in Death, Dying and Bereavement (pp. 214-226). Routledge.
Attachment & Grief
  • Wonderly, M. L. (2016). On being attached. Philosophical Studies, 173(1), 223-242.
Breakups
  • Lopez-Cantero, P. (2018). The Break-Up Check: Exploring Romantic Love through Relationship Terminations. Philosophia, (46), 689–703.
Categorising Grief
Disenfranchised Grief
  • Rinofner-Kreidl, S. (2016). On Grief’s Ambiguous Nature. Quaestiones Disputatae, 7(1), 178-207.
Grief and mental illness
  • Austin, E. A. (2016). Plato on Grief as a Mental Disorder. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 98 (1), 1-20.
  • Cooper, R. (2012) Complicated Grief: Philosophical Perspectives. In Stroebe, M., Schut, H., Boelen, P. & van den Bout, J. (eds.), Complicated Grief: Scientific Foundations for Health Care Professionals (pp. 13-26). Routledge.
  • Kopelman, L. M. (1994). Normal Grief: Good or Bad? Health or Disease? Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 1(4), 209–220.
  • McCracken, J. (2005). Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly: Reflections on the Special Character of Grief. International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 19(1), 139-156.
  • Wilkinson, S. (2016). Is ’Normal Grief ’ a Mental Disorder? The Philosophical Quarterly, 50(200), 289–304.
Grief and Mourning
  • Bilimoria, P. (2011). On Grief and Mourning: Thinking a Feeling, Back to Bob Solomon. Sophia, 50, 281–301.
Ecological Grief
  • Albrecht, G.A. (2020). Negating Solastalgia: An Emotional Revolution from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene. American Imago, 77(1), 9-30.
  • Clark, T. (2020). Ecological Grief and Anthropocene Horror. American Imago, 77(1), 61-80.
  • Stolorow, R. D. (2020). Planet Earth: Crumbling Metaphysical Illusion*. American Imago, 77(1), 105-107.
Metaphysics
Composition as Identity
  • Baxter, D. L. M. (2005). Altruism, Grief, and Identity. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 70(2), 371 - 383.
  • Garland, C. E. (2019) Grief and composition as identity. The Philosophical Quarterly, 0(0), 1-16.
Ethics and Political Philosophy
  • Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
  • Cholbi, M. (2017). Grief and End-of-life Surrogate Decision Making. In J. K. Davis (ed.), Ethics at the End of Life: New Issues and Arguments. New York: Routledge. pp. 201-217.
  • Friedrich, A. B. (2019). More Than “Spending Time with the Body”: The Role of a Family’s Grief in Determinations of Brain Death. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 16(4), 489-499.
  • Kristjánsson, K. (2015). Grief: An Aristotelian Justification of an Emotional Virtue. Res Philosophica, 92(4), 805-828.
  • Tomasini, F. (2009). Is post-mortem harm possible? Understanding death harm and grief. Bioethics, 23(8), 441-449
Grief and moral obligation
  • Blustein, J. (2008). The Responsibility of Remembrance. In The Moral Demands of Memory (pp. 240-300). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511818615.006
  • Higgins, K. (2013). Love and death. In J. Deigh (Ed.), On emotions: Philosophical essays (pp. 159–178). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • McCracken, J. (2005). Falsely, Sanely, Shallowly: Reflections on the Special Character of Grief. International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 19(1), 139-156.
  • Solomon, R.C. (2004). On Grief and Gratitude. In In Defense of Sentimentality (Chapter 4, pp. 75–101). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Varga, S. & Gallagher, S. (2020). Anticipatory-Vicarious Grief: The Anatomy of a Moral Emotion. The Monist, 103(2), 176–189. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onz034
Aesthetics
  • Higgins, K. M. (2020). Aesthetics and the Containment of Grief. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 78(1), 9-20.
Philosophy of Film & Grief
  • Bell, E. (2014). Grief Time: Feeling Philosophy in Inception. Film and Philosophy, 14, 19-35.
  • Carel, H. (2011). In the Grip of Grief: Epistemic Impotence and the Materiality of Mourning in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Vital. In H. Carel & G. Tuck (Eds.), New Takes in Film-Philosophy (pp. 240 – 255). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Philosophy of Religion
  • Saint Augustine. (397-400 AD/2006) Confessions. F. Sheed, trans., Michael P. Foley, ed. Indianapolis: Hackett. Original composition.
Eastern Philosophy
  • Olberding, A. (2007) Sorrow and the Sage: Grief in the Zhuangzi. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 6 (4), 339-359.
  • Olberding, A. (2004) The Consummation of Sorrow: An Analysis of Confucius' Grief for Yan Hui.  Philosophy East and West, 54(3), 279-301.
  • Tsai, Y. M. (2016). Neither Bereavement nor Grief: Coping with the Death of a Cherished Person in the Cunda-sutta. Contemporary Buddhism, 17(2), 357-368.
Practical Philosophy
  • Attig, T. (1996). How We Grieve: Relearning the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Philosophy as a tool for managing grief
  • Diaz-Waian, M. (2014) How Philosophy Can Help Us Grieve: Navigating the Wake(s) of Loss. International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 28(1)
Other Philosophical Works 
  • ​Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations, (Part II), 3rd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.