Philosophers of Grief

Philosophers "don't like to talk about" grief, wrote Robert C. Solomon, the longtime Quincy Lee professor of business and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, in his last book, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (Oxford University Press, 2007). That's because philosophers aren't grief counselors or therapists, he explained. The "bereaved," Solomon counseled, "should look elsewhere than to philosophy for solace."
I disagree. Because Bob Solomonmy longtime friend, meal mate at philosophy conferences, and onetime regular book reviewer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the daily paper in the city where he grew upcollapsed and died in the Zurich Airport this past January while changing planes. I feel grief. His work over the years on emotions helps me make sense of it.
Solomon, an expert on existentialism whose final thoughts on that subject ran in The Chronicle in January, was also the go-to guy in philosophy when it came to emotions, the scholar the dictionary and encyclopedia editors called first. That didn't matter much for a long time in 20th-century philosophy, because the discipline's focus remained elsewhere.
Emotions? Soft, spongy stuff for sentimentalists, fans of soap operas, irrational sorts with mushy minds. Didn't Kant declare emotions, or "inclinations," irrelevant to moral reasoning? Non-girly men — that is, real philosophers (mostly men in the heyday of 20th-century philosophy) — dated reason, argument, evidence. The icier the logic, the happier the brainiac.
But Solomon knew something his contemporaries didn't: Emotions don't disappear just because they're not tenured by a clique of academics, separated at graduate-school birth from connection to real life by their field's hyperprofessionalization