Gratitude

Last month, I spoke at a conference in honour of Dick Moran. My topic was grief, and like much of my work, my talk was indebted to his example—a model of philosophy that is humanistic both in its attention to the form and matter of human life, and in the way that it approaches them.

Dick is unusual among philosophers in being genuinely wise, and one of my favourite moments of wisdom in his work is a rejoinder to the “proverbial injunction against crying over spilt milk”: “if we can’t cry after the milk is spilled,” Dick innocently asks, “when can we cry?” It’s an excellent question—though my talk would add two more: “When can we stop crying? And why should it seem as though we can’t?”

The conference ended with Dick expressing gratitude for our expressions of gratitude with philosophical reflections on the nature of gratitude, to which we responded in the only way we could: expressing gratitude for his thanks with an impromptu philosophical salon on gratitude and the gift.

One of the gif…