Mikolaj Slawkowski-Rode

Grief is a universal human response to death and loss. Mourning is an equally universally observable practice that enables the bereaved to express their grief and come to terms with the reality of loss. Yet, despite their prevalence, there is no unified understanding of the nature and meaning of grief and mourning. The Meaning of Mourning: Perspectives on Death, Loss, and Grief brings together fifteen essays from diverse disciplines addressing the topics of death, grief, and mourning. The collection moves from general questions concerning the putative badness of death and the meaning of loss through the phenomenology and psychology of grief, to personal and cultural aspects of mourning. Contributors examine topics such as theodicy and grief, reproductive loss, mourning as a form of recognition of value, the roots of grief in early childhood, grief in COVID-times, hope, phenomenology of loss, public commemoration and mourning rituals, mourning for a devastated culture, the Necropolis of Glasgow, and the “art of outliving.” Edited by Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode, the volume provides a survey of the rich topography of methodologies, problems, approaches, and disciplines that are involved in the study of issues surrounding loss and our responses to it and guides the reader through a spectrum of perspectives, highlighting the connections and discontinuities between them.

Preview: This special issue of Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture follows on from the double special issue on Science and Religion published at the end of last year. This double issue focused primarily on questions in metaphysics and ontology. What several of the contributions have pointed out, however, is that the naturalistic worldview, which takes empirical science to be the only reliable source of knowledge, also implies a certain approach to living. Unsurprisingly this outlook extends beyond epistemological commitments of naturalism and has consequences for the fundamental values which guide some of our choices and shape our outlook on the world. Being critical of this trend Roger Scruton has called it the charm of, or enchantment with, disenchantment.

Questions concerning death and the afterlife are amongst the most perennial in philosophy and theology. Traditionally, the afterlife was the answer that many religions offered in response to the mystery with which death presents us. This answer has metaphysical, anthropological, and ethical implications in that it appeals to a transcendent justification to ground our understanding of human nature, the concepts of justice and moral obligation, as well as more general propositions pertaining to the nature of reality. In recent years, with the advances in science, which have helped us to better understand the processes surrounding death and the developments in our thinking about personal identity, which have influenced how we construe the possibility of an afterlife, the more traditional conceptions of what we might expect after death have come under pressure.

Preview: This is the second volume of the double issue of Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture devoted to the relationship between science and religion. The contributions across these two volumes have mostly been concerned with, and argued for, various aspects of a non-reductive view of this relationship, according to which reality is not limited to what the natural sciences can tell us about it. That is the view that science and religion are not in conflict, or that the advances made by the natural sciences do not undermine religion as an adequate means of addressing the big questions humanity faces. This is not only a very welcome but also exciting result confirming that after many decades of an almost complete monopoly of scientific naturalism in English language philosophy the field is beginning to open up to a more diverse range of views. This development has made it possible for philosophers in the analytic tradition to engage with topics of deep human importance in a serious and systematic way.

Preview: Science and religion are complex cultural phenomena, which bear on our understanding of the world, life, consciousness, agency, morality, as well as all other fundamental issues human beings puzzle over. There exists a longstanding question about whether science and religion, and the responses they offer to these issues, are complementary or in conflict. The conflict narrative, championed for example by the New Atheists, emphasizes discrepancies between scientific and religious explanations and typically advances methodological, ethical, and ontological naturalism as providing us with the only adequate means of addressing the big questions humanity faces. The complementarity narrative, without denying the advances of the natural sciences, tends to take the view that it is possible to retain elements of a religious worldview alongside the discoveries of natural science. A traditional focus in the European context has been on the viability of certain ethical ideas whose original justification was arguably based in Christianity, such as human dignity, moral equality, and the centrality of humility, compassion and sacrifice.

One of the core themes of Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris is the encounter with radical otherness. The ocean planet being studied by scientists form earth is usually interpreted as a representation of radical otherness, which eludes human efforts of understanding. In this paper we argue that in Solaris Lem attempts to show not merely that the ocean is unknowable, but that the unknowability is itself impossible to adequately conceptualise and represent. However, we further argue that this impossibility is the subject of an experience in which the presence of otherness is made available. We focus on the images of chaos which Kelvin discovers on Solaris to show that Lem presents the epistemic situation of the main protagonist as radically unstable. Contrary to most interpretations, however, we argue that the discursive narration in the novel engages with the presence of otherness only superficially. Rather, we suggest that the encounter with otherness is shown as something that manifests itself in bodily emotions, and is, therefore, only possible to convey non-discursively. The fear and dread inspired by the vastness and strangeness of the ocean are always presented by appeal to sensuality and bodily experience. These emotive reactions to encounters with otherness subvert its conceptual representations. We suggest that in this way Lem attempts to convey what cannot be discursively described, or even depicted. He presents radical otherness as something impossible to represent conceptually but offers a vision of the possibility of an encounter with otherness through bodily emotions. On this interpretation Solaris is not only a novel about the encounter with otherness, but also about the very possibility of representing such an encounter.

In this paper I revisit the debate concerning the distinction, which is sometimes made between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy. I look at the historical context in which the distinction came to prominence in the twentieth century, the reasons why it subsequently declined in popularity, and eventually had begun to be undermined. I argue that the distinction possesses intuitive content, which the recent attempts at exposing it as conceptually flawed fail to account for. I suggest that the intuitive content of the distinction provides us with resources to usefully define two different ways philosophical reflection has been approached during the course of the twentieth century. I conclude by suggesting that we can bring these two ways of approaching philosophy into focus by appealing to the idea of philosophical temperament.