Philosophy

Talk Title:  Grieving Our Way back to Meaningfulness

Abstract: As social creatures, we humans invest our identities in others, presupposing their existence as we go about our day-to-day choices and actions. But when they die, their deaths frequently generate a sense of disorientation or alienation from the world that signals a crisis in the meaningfulness of our lives. For their deaths represent a threat to the background frames of agency within which much of our deliberation and choice takes place. Here I argued for a dual role for grief in addressing this threat: Because grief responds to the loss of our relationship with the deceased as it was prior to their death, grief alerts us to this threat to our lives’ meaningfulness and motivates us to defuse this threat by revising our practical identities to accommodate the modification in our relationship that their death necessitates. Simultaneously, the emotional complexity and richness of grief episodes provides an abundance of normative evidence regarding our relationship with the deceased and our identities, evidence that can enable us to re-establish those identities and thereby recover a sense of our lives as meaningful.

Research Bio: Dr. Michael Cholbi (University of Edinburgh) specializes in ethical theory,  practical ethics, and the philosophy of death and dying. His current research interests are focused on Kantian ethics, particularly respect for persons, equality, and agency; death and dying, including suicide and assisted dying, immortality, and grief; ethics of work and labor; paternalism; and procreative and parental ethics.