Grief Utterances

The claim “I’ve lost a part of myself,” uttered by the bereaved, may seem metaphorical. However, over the past two decades several philosophers-including Donald Baxter, David Shoemaker, and Carolyn Garland-have developed accounts of personal identity that allow such claims to be understood as literally true. In this talk, I do two things. First, I describe a richer repertoire of grief utterances based on discussions of grief on social media. Second, I sketch a new picture of personal identity that explains how seemingly metaphorical grief utterances can be literally true.

Vilius Dranseika is a philosopher at Jagiellonian University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics in Kraków, Poland. His research focuses on the psychological underpinnings of philosophical concepts and theories. Recently, the main themes of his work have been personal identity, death, and memory. He is also interested in computational approaches-ranging from natural language processing to citation analysis-applied to philosophy, including its history.