Matthew Ratcliffe, "Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience" (MIT Press, 2022)
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What is the central thesis of Matthew Ratcliffe’s *Grief Worlds*?
Welcome to the new books network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdoor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. And I'm co hosting the channel along with Robert Talise, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Matthew Ratcliffe, Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. His new book, Grief Worlds, a study of emotional experience, is just out from the MIT press. The grief we feel when someone close to us dies is characterized by a complex and profound experience of loss. But what is this experience?
In Grief Worlds, Ratcliffe articulates a common structure to grief experiences, even while emphasizing that each person's experience is highly individual. In his account, we live in experiential worlds structured by valued possibilities and anticipations that are integral to our identities as persons, and in grief we experience a disruption or undermining of these networks of significant possibilities. His analysis draws on personal testimonies of grief experiences gathered in a public survey, along with philosophical work from the analytic and phenomenological traditions. Rakov also examines the bodily phenomenology of grief. The ways we transition to post bereavement worlds and the ways in which continuing bonds with the deceased and the pre bereavement world can be adaptive.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello Matthew, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Other curry.
Um I'm very easy. Uh excited to w talk about Grief Worlds, a study of emotional experience. Um Uh before we begin, let's Get a bit of information about about you. Um, so how did you become a philosopher and how did you come to write this book?
Oh, how did I become a philosopher? Um Well, I think going back to when I was a teenager, I suppose, I'd got it into my head that I was going to be a medical doctor or a vet or something like that, but it didn't I don't think I was genuinely interested and what did strike me was that Everything just seemed uh utterly strange and bewildering and peculiar, and things that people took for granted seemed sort of rather baffling. So I guess that drove me into philosophy. I did a first degree in philosophy and psychology at Durham University. And then I drifted into philosophy of science at Cambridge during my M Phyllum PhD. And then after that I took a rather staggering route, driven by contingency rather than purpose, and ended up working on a combination of
uh phenomenology, philosophy of psychiatry, and I suppose uh interdisciplinary emotion theory. And that's kind of where I've settled ever since really.
Mm. Well this book certainly brings, you know, a lot of those things together, um, because it's the phenomenology of the grief. Process um Uh I guess a good way to begin is to get an idea of what you consider to be grief, right? I mean you you br a brief description would be or definition would be an emotional response. to loss. Um, but obviously there's a bit more to say about that. So what is what is your analysis of grief?
Well, yes, I suppose one of the first tasks might be to get to sort of clarify one's referent. So if I'm offering a phenomenological analysis of grief, what am I actually talking about? I mean in fact, I don't want to be too prescriptive. Uh I I've been thinking about grief in the book book primarily um in relation to the death of a person. So we can think of it as a protracted emotional response to the death of a person one one loves or cares about deeply. However, if you look at everyday discourse, the term grief is used in a more permissive way as well. So people will talk about grief over the breakup of a relationship. uh sometimes grief over the loss loss of a job. Uh also maybe something will come too later, grief over things that never happened or never will be.
So there's this more permissive use of grief where it's used to refer to a range of non death losses and how we experience them.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central thesis of Matthew Ratcliffe’s *Grief Worlds*?
0:01–8:48
2
How did Ratcliffe’s academic journey lead him to study grief?
8:48–17:42
3
How does Ratcliffe define grief and distinguish it from other losses?
17:42–25:42
4
What methodology did the public grief‑experience survey use and what kinds of testimonies were gathered?
25:42–35:14
5
What is the two‑sided phenomenological structure of grief that Ratcliffe proposes?
35:14–43:22
6
How does the bodily phenomenology of grief relate to phantom‑limb experiences?
43:22–52:03
7
In what ways did the COVID‑19 pandemic reveal broader forms of loss and disorientation?
52:03–1:01:05
8
What future research directions does Ratcliffe outline for studying loss and emotional haunting?
1:01:05–1:09:15
Speakers
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