Grief, smell, & the olfactory air of a person Becky Millar & Louise Richardson 1,2 Abstract: Philosophical research into olfaction often focuses on its limitations. We explore instead an underappreciated capacity of the sense of smell, namely, its role in interpersonal experience. To illustrate this, we examine how smell can enable continuing connections to deceased loved ones. Understanding this phenomenon requires an appreciation of, first, how olfaction’s limitations can facilitate experiences of the deceased person, and second, how olfaction enables experiences of what we refer to as the ‘olfactory air’ of a person. This way of experiencing someone privileges their status as an environmentally situated human animal. Key words: grief, smell, memory, interpersonal cognition, continuing bonds 1. Introduction Many who have suffered a bereavement report smelling the possessions, clothes, pillows and perfumes of their deceased loved one in order to feel a sense of continued connection to them. The prevalence of these smell-related experiences and behaviours suggests that smell is well suited to making us feel close to a person who has died. It is puzzling, however, that the sense of smell should play this role. This sensory modality is often taken to be relatively unimportant, limited in the roles it can play for us, especially when compared with senses such as sight and hearing. This might be thought to be supported by the majority philosophical opinion that the sense of smell is representationally impoverished, allowing, for example, only for the experience of odours and their olfactory properties. 3 In this paper, we suggest that the sense of smell is however particularly well-placed to provide a sense of closeness to the dead and in part because of its representational limitations. The explanation we give of the capacity of smell to provide this sense of closeness does not require us to deny that odours are the primary object of olfactory experience, nor to embrace an implausibly inflated account of the properties that olfactory experience can represent. On the contrary, we suggest, it is partly because smelling the smell of another person even in life is (at least in the 1