What Can Grief Teach Us About Ourselves?

You can also listen to this interview on a free app on iTunes and Google Play Store entitled 'Raj Persaud in conversation', which includes a lot of free information on the latest research findings in psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and mental health, plus interviews with top experts from around the world. Download it free from these links. Don't forget to check out the bonus content button on the app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rajpersaud.android.rajpersaud

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dr-raj-persaud-in-conversation/id927466223?

 

Grief and Grieving a guide for the confused

https://michael.cholbi.com/

Grief: A Philosophical Guide published by Princeton University Press

• Michael Cholbi

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.

 

The pandemic has flooded the world with grief, but we’re not in a ‘grief pandemic’

Michael Cholbi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely in ethical theory, practical ethics, and the philosophy of death and dying. His books include Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions (Broadview, 2011), Understanding Kant’s Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Grief: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton University Press, expected 2021). He is the editor of several scholarly collections, including Immortality and the Philosophy of Death (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015); Procreation, Parenthood, and Educational Rights (Routledge, 2017); The Future of Work, Technology, and Basic Income (Routledge, 2019); and The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is the the co-editor of the textbook Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, forthcoming 2020).  His work has also appeared in a number of scholarly journals, including Ethics, Mind, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. In recent years, he has been an acdemic visitor at Australian National University, the University of Turku (Finland), and the Hastings Center - Bioethics Research Insitute.

His current research interests are

• Kantian ethics, particularly respect for persons, equality, and rational agency
• death and dying, including suicide and assisted dying, immortality, and grief
• ethics of work and labor
• paternalism
• procreative and parental ethics

Qualifications

Ph.D, University of Virginia, 1999 [President's Fellow and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellow]

Responsibilities & affiliations

• Founder,  International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying
• Editorial board, Journal of Applied Philosophy
• Board of advisors, Social Theory and Practice
• Area editor (Ethics), Ergo
• International advisory board, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
• Former editor, Teaching Philosophy
• Multiple roles within the American Philosophical Association, including Divisional Executive Committe Member, the Committe on Teaching Philosophy, and the Committee on Public Philosophy