•  1061
    Grief, Continuing Bonds, and Unreciprocated Love
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (3): 413-436. 2022.
    The widely accepted “continuing bonds” model of grief tells us that rather than bereavement necessitating the cessation of one’s relationship with the deceased, very often the relationship continues instead in an adapted form. However, this framework appears to conflict with philosophical approaches that treat reciprocity or mutuality of some form as central to loving relationships. Seemingly the dead cannot be active participants, rendering it puzzling how we should understand claims about cont…Read more
  •  692
    ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other than bereavement are properly termed ‘grief’. To do so, we focus on widespread experiences of grief that have been reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. We consider two potential objections to a more permissive use of the term: grief is, by definition, a response to a death; grief is subject to certain norms that apply only to the case of bereavement. Having shown that these objections are …Read more
  •  400
    Grief: A Philosophical Guide (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3): 875-877. 2022.
    Despite being one of life's most disruptive, painful, and puzzling experiences, grief has been rather neglected within philosophical scholarship until recently.
  •  141
    On the Appropriateness of Grief to Its Object
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1-17. forthcoming.
    How we understand the nature and role of grief depends on what we take its object to be and vice versa. This paper focuses on recent claims by philosophers that grief is frequently or even inherently irrational or inappropriate in one or another respect, all of which hinge on assumptions concerning the proper object of grief. By emphasizing the temporally extended structure of grief, we offer an alternative account of its object that undermines these assumptions and dissolves the apparent proble…Read more
  •  118
    Smelling objects
    Synthese 196 (10): 4279-4303. 2019.
    Objects are central to perception and our interactions with the world. We perceive the world as parsed into discrete entities that instantiate particular properties, and these items capture our attention and shape how we interact with the environment. Recently there has been some debate about whether the sense of smell allows us to perceive odours as discrete objects, with some suggesting that olfaction is aspatial and doesn’t allow for object-individuation. This paper offers two empirically tra…Read more
  •  81
    Towards a sensorimotor approach to flavour and smell
    Mind and Language 36 (2): 221-240. 2020.
    Sensorimotor enactivism takes perceptual experience to be constituted by a kind of attunement to sensorimotor contingencies – law‐like relations between sensory inputs and bodily activity. The chemical senses have traditionally been construed as especially simple and passive, and a number of philosophers have argued that flavour and smell are problem cases for the sensorimotor approach. In this article, I respond to these objections to the sensorimotor approach, and in doing so offer the beginni…Read more
  •  74
    Horror Films and Grief
    with Jonny Lee
    Emotion Review 13 (3): 171-182. 2021.
    Many of the most popular and critically acclaimed horror films feature grief as a central theme. This article argues that horror films are especially suited to portraying and communicating the phenomenology of grief. We explore two overlapping claims. First, horror is well suited to represent the experience of grief, in particular because the disruptive effects of horror “monsters” on protagonists mirror the core experience of disruption that accompanies bereavement. Second, horror offers ways i…Read more
  •  48
    Grief, Smell and the Olfactory Air of a Person
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (4): 769-790. 2023.
    Philosophical research into olfaction often focuses on its limitations. We explore instead an underappreciated capacity of the sense of smell, namely, its role in interpersonal experience. To illustrate this, we examine how smell can enable continuing connections to deceased loved ones. Understanding this phenomenon requires an appreciation of, first, how olfaction's limitations can facilitate experiences of the deceased person and, second, how olfaction enables experiences of what we refer to a…Read more
  •  48
    Grief’s impact on sensorimotor expectations: an account of non-veridical bereavement experiences
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (2): 1-22. 2021.
    The philosophy of grief has directed little attention to bereavement’s impact on perceptual experience. However, misperceptions, hallucinations and other anomalous experiences are strikingly common following the death of a loved one. Such experiences range from misperceiving a stranger to be the deceased, to phantom sights, sounds and smells, to nebulous quasi-sensory experiences of the loved one’s presence. This paper draws upon the enactive sensorimotor theory of perception to offer a phenomen…Read more
  •  30
    Grief and the non-death losses of Covid-19
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (5): 1087-1103. 2023.
    Articles in the popular media and testimonies collected in empirical work suggest that many people who have not been bereaved have nevertheless grieved over pandemic-related losses of various kinds. There is a philosophical question about whether any experience of a non-death loss ought to count as grief, hinging upon how the object of grief is construed. However, even if one accepts that certain significant non-death losses are possible targets of grief, many reported cases of putative pandemic…Read more
  •  27
    Empirical research provides striking examples of non-human animal responses to death, which look very much like manifestations of grief. However, recent philosophical work appears to challenge the idea that animals can grieve. Grief, in contrast to more rudimentary emotional experiences, has been taken to require potentially human-exclusive abilities like a fine-grained sense of particularity, an ability to project toward the distal future and the past, and an understanding of death or loss. Thi…Read more
  •  23
    Grief’s impact on sensorimotor expectations: an account of non-veridical bereavement experiences
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (2): 439-460. 2023.
    The philosophy of grief has directed little attention to bereavement’s impact on perceptual experience. However, misperceptions, hallucinations and other anomalous experiences are strikingly common following the death of a loved one. Such experiences range from misperceiving a stranger to be the deceased, to phantom sights, sounds and smells, to nebulous quasi-sensory experiences of the loved one’s presence. This paper draws upon the enactive sensorimotor theory of perception to offer a phenomen…Read more
  •  23
    The mechanistic model depicts scientific explanations as involving the discovery of multi-level, organized components that constitute a target phenomenon. Meanwhile, sensorimotor enactivism purports to offer a scientifically informed account of perceptual experience as a skill-laden interactive relationship, constitutively involving both perceiver and world, rather than as an agent-bound representation of the world. Insofar as sensorimotor enactivism identifies an empirically tractable phenomeno…Read more
  • This chapter argues that smell and flavour perception present distinctive challenges for phenomenological reflection, but that these difficulties can be addressed through a ‘gestaltist’ approach to perceptual organisation. I argue that the ‘chemical’ senses do not generally allow immediate access to ordinary objects like roses and apples, but rather to odours and flavours, the diffuse nature of which make it hard to get a grip on the associated perceptual phenomenology. Drawing on the work of ge…Read more