Recent Work on the Concept of Gratitude in Philosophy and Psychology

This paper constitutes a critical review of the recent philosophical and psychological literatures on the concept of gratitude, literatures which have proliferated in recent years. Indeed, it seems everybody nowadays wants to enthuse about gratitude. In theological circles that is no novelty; ever since St Paul's exhortation in Thessalonians 5:18, In every thing give thanks, for this is the will of God, most scholars working within the Christian tradition have accorded gratitude a high value. More surprisingly, however, academics reared in the secular disciplines of psychology and philosophy have recently jumped on the pro-gratitude bandwagon. Gone are the days when gratitude was deemed the emotion most neglected by psychologists and when philosophers could rightly observe that contemporary philosophy has had comparatively little to say about gratitude. Suddenly, eliciting the conceptual contours of gratitude has become a popular endeavor in philosophy, and psychologists have eagerly started to tease out the relationship between gratitude and a number of positive personal and social variables. Many of those psychologists hail from the newly established positive-psychology camp which has shifted attention within social science to a number of understudied topics alongside gratitude, such as forgiveness, hope, and optimism, and even those hot-to-handle-for-empirical-scientists concepts of moral character and virtue, previously banished from the discipline.