ABSTRACT
As the chapters in this collection variously attest, the topic of gratitude has lately attracted much interest from scholars in a variety of arts and social science disciplines, though perhaps most notably in recent times from those of academic philosophy and psychology. Given the rather diverse concerns and interests of such disciplines, however, it is only to be expected that contemporary research has all too often pursued the ostensibly common quarry of gratitude down different rabbit holes of not always clearly connected enquiry. Philosophers have primarily sought conceptual clarification of the term ‘gratitude’ and/or its cognates– an enterprise that has not, of course, managed to steer clear omore normative or prescriptive advice or recommendations about how such termsshould be used in the interests of coherent and perspicuous usage. Indeed, it may be already at this point – to which more than one contribution to this volume is sensitive (seeChapters 8 and 14)– that tensions between the different disciplines initially emerge,since it may be tempting to regard the conjectures and refutations of philosophers as high-handedly legislative or prescriptive of common ways of talking that might well be allowed some authority on the grounds that they are after all (empirically speaking) common.
