ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the phenomenology of grief involves alternation between localized and non-localized experiences of presence and absence. Grief is a variable and changeable way of relating to the dead, the living, and the social world. The chapter proposed, more tentatively, that there is such a thing as a second-person experience of death. Relations with the dead therefore constitute an important aspect of interpersonal and social experience, and any philosophical account of social cognition that seeks to be comprehensive should accommodate them. The chapter turns to our relations with the dead and, more specifically, to experiences of grief. It considers why the world as a whole often seems profoundly different following bereavement and interpret this in terms of the effect upon habitual routines, projects, pastimes, and commitments, the intelligibility of which depended upon the deceased. The chapter concludes by turning to another aspect of grief, which might call a 'second-person experience of death'.
