Abstract

Grief at a loved one's death varies according to several factors but it often includes beliefs in both the "sympathy" evaluation, that death is a terrible evil for the dead, and the "ego" evaluation, that a person's death is a terrible evil for the loving ones of that person. Typically, grief also includes, as responses to these evaluations, both pangs of sorrow and inhibition. ;Consolations , culled from ancient and modern sources, are directed against either the sympathy or ego evaluations, or against the responses to these evaluations. The former are classified as "evaluation" consolations, the latter as "affect" consolations. ;Separate chapters are devoted to the development and examination of evaluation consolations based on the belief that the dead are annihilated, based on a reductionist analysis of a person's continued existence, based on different theories of the nature of time, and based upon claims that there are goods which death supposedly contributes to life. All these and other evaluation consolations are found wanting. ;More promising are affect consolations that grief responses have eudaemonic, ethological and epistemic disadvantages. However, as grief responses also have eudaemonic, ethological and epistemic advantages, and as "weighing" these advantages and disadvantages depends upon undetermined empirical considerations, these affect consolations are inconclusive. ;The classification and appraisal of consolations offered in this dissertation is presented in dialogue form. Two friends try to comfort a third who is grieving. ;The appendix lists over one hundred different consolations, along with references to their literary sources. These sources include, among others, the writings of Epicurus, Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Jerome, Montaigne, Bertrand Russell and Derek Parfit