ERIC CULLHED
Intelligent and Accessible Narrative Non-fiction
Non-Fiction
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CRYING
Rights and awards
Rights
Sweden
Eric Cullhed is a professor of Greek at Uppsala University with a broad interdisciplinary profile. Recently, he has been a visiting fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the Centre for Affective Sciences in Geneva, and the LOGOS research group in analytic philosophy in Barcelona. His academic work spans classics, the history of emotions, and philosophical psychology, and he has published in leading international journals across all of these fields.
Half-Swedish and half-Peruvian, Eric grew up between two radically different cultures of emotional expression — a contrast that would eventually lead him to the question at the heart of his first trade book: why do human beings cry? The Philosophy of Crying (Natur & Kultur, 2026) is the product of ten years of interdisciplinary research and the first book to systematically evaluate the competing theories of crying — from ancient Stoic philosophers to contemporary evolutionary psychologists — and to propose a unified account of our most mysterious behaviour as an explicable yet irreplaceable form of embodied communication. Combining intellectual rigour with an accessible, personal voice, the book has received extensive national media coverage in Sweden.
Eric is entering a new stage of his career, and will be embarking on writing a series of books for the wider trade audience exploring aspects of human experience that are intimately familiar yet profoundly mysterious, combining deep global cultural history with insights from philosophy, psychology, and the natural sciences. The Philosophy of Crying, the author’s trade debut, is the first of these titles.
Bibliography
2026 – The Philosophy of Crying (Gråt), non-fiction title
Author photo
Mikael Wallerstedt. For photo rights please contact the photographer at mikael@wallerstedt.se