# Absence experience in grief **Abstract:** In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philo- Correspondence Louise Richardson, Department of Philosophy, sophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that University of York, York, YO10 5DD, whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might United Kingdom. be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence Email: [email protected] Funding information Arts and Humanities Research Council, Grant/ Award Number: AH/T000066/1 experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, I will argue, the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief, we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief. If there is any time in a life when we might expect experiences of absence to occur, it is during a period of grieving. After **Authors:** [[Louise Richardson]]