Introduction

A central ambition with this centre has been to facilitate cross-disciplinary examinations of the complex relations between grief experiences and the “cultural setting and conception of happiness and distress within which grief is situated in our time”; hence, the centre aims at examining grief not merely as a matter of health and illness but as a profound existential and cultural problem to which all known cultures have developed elaborate practices and culturally sanctioned responses. The intention of the symposium was to bring together and facilitate a dialogue between scholars from different disciplines whose works have contributed significantly to our own understanding of the subject matter. While death and dying has long been a significant topic of phenomenology, it is not until recently that philosophical phenomenologists have started to engage specifically with the experience of the death of the intimate others.