72 – Grief in the Time of a Pandemic

Lots of people are dying right now. But people die all the time. How should we respond to all this death? In this episode I talk to Michael Cholbi about the philosophy of grief. Michael Cholbi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely in ethical theory, practical ethics, and the philosophy of death and dying. We discus the nature of grief, the ethics of grief and how grief might change in the midst of a pandemic.

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Show Notes

Topics discussed include…

• What is grief?
• What are the different forms of grief?
• Is grief always about death?
• Is grief a good thing?
• Is grief a bad thing?
• Does the cause of death make a difference to grief?
• How does the COVID 19 pandemic disrupt grief?
• What are the politics of grief?
• Will future societies memorialise the deaths of people in the pandemic?

Relevant Links

• Michael’s Homepage
• Regret, Resilience and the Nature of Grief by Michael
• Finding the Good in Grief by Michael
• Grief’s Rationality, Backward and Forward by Michael
• Coping with Grief: A Series of Philosophical Disquisitions by me
• Grieving alone — coronavirus upends funeral rites (Financial Times)
• Coronavirus: How Covid-19 is denying dignity to the dead in Italy (BBC)
• Why the 1918 Spanish flu defied both memory and imagination
• 100 years later, why don’t we commemorate the victims and heroes of ‘Spanish flu’?