The overarching aim of this project is to develop a detailed, wide-ranging, and integrated account of what it is to experience grief.
More specific objectives of the project are organized around three overlapping thematic areas:
More specific objectives of the project are organized around three overlapping thematic areas:
1. Emotion and Perception
- What do temporally extended emotional processes consist of? What –if anything- unifies them, and which characteristics distinguish one type of emotional process from another?
- How can emotional experiences such as grief be both specifically focused and, at the same time, all-enveloping? How do these aspects of grief relate to one another?
- What do experiences of the deceased as present or conspicuously absent consist of? What does this tell us about the relationships between emotion, perception, and belief?
2. Interpersonal Experience and Understanding
- What are the core commitments of the ‘continuing bonds’ approach to grief, and how might that approach be brought into fruitful dialogue with work in philosophy and cognitive science on interpersonal experience, understanding, and relatedness?
- Should the field of interdisciplinary social cognition research, which has to date focused exclusively on our relations with the living, also encompass our relations with the dead?
- What do ‘bereavement hallucinations’, in all their diversity, consist of? Are some or all of them properly regarded as perceptual experiences in one or more modalities?
- By studying the effects of bereavement, what can we learn about the manner in which experience, thought, and activity are regulated by relations with other people?
- How is grief and its unfolding shaped by regulative processes involving the interpretation of grief by self and others, including the co-construction and revision of narratives?
3. The Bounds of Grief
- How does grief over the death of a person differ from other emotions, including other responses to loss?
- How, if at all, can experiences of typical or healthy grief be distinguished phenomenologically from forms of pathological grief and depression? What are the implications of this for psychiatric classification, diagnosis, research, and treatment?
- What are the broader impacts of a detailed philosophical account of grief-experiences?