Peter Goldie
The Narrative of a Grieving
What I will consider in my paper is the complexity of grieving, such that it cannot be analysed or understood as the experience of a single emotion (sadness at a loss for example), nor even as a mixture or blend of emotions. I will look at an alternative view, according to which the experience of grieving is best captured in narrative form, involving a multiplicity of thoughts, feelings, actions, expressive actions, and so on. This view is, I will suggest, well placed to explain how our grieving is bound up with memories of our past, viewed now in the light of what we now know: that the object loved is gone.
Peter Goldie is The Samuel Hall Chair at the University of Manchester. His main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, ethics and aesthetics, and particularly in questions concerning value and how the mind engages with value. He is the author of three monographs: The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (2000); On Personality (2004); and Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art? (with Elisabeth Schellekens, 2009). He is editor of Understanding Emotions: Mind and Morals (2002); co-editor of Philosophy and Conceptual Art (2006); and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (2010). He is currently writing a monograph on narrative.