When blame is understood to be emotion-based or affective, its emotional tone is standardly identified as one of anger. We argue that this conception of affective blame is overly restrictive. By attending to cases of blame that emerge against a background of a particular kind of hope invested in others, we identify a blaming response characterized not by anger but by sadness: reactive disappointment. We develop an account of reactive disappointment as affective blame, maintaining that while angry blame (...) and disappointed blame are both condemnatory responses, they have distinct evaluative foci and occupy different but complementary roles in our accountability practices. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophy and Political Disappointment Education, Disappointment, Hope An‐Archism, Levinas and Ethical Protest Levinas and Badiou: Towards a Present Hope Notes.

In his new work, Disappointment, Bruce Fleming starts from the realization that even objective views of the world are so only under specific circumstances. Subjects range from war and the nature of explanation systems such as science and astrology to a concept Fleming calls "coloring." When we identify coloring, it seems to us that a single quality of something larger has eclipsed all its other qualities—for example, skin color or sexual orientation coming to stand for the whole much more (...) complex individual. (shrink)

Despite the recent revival of revolutionary commitment in response to left melancholia, I suggest that the contemporary academic left has not adequately addressed the difficulty of responding to failure as an inevitable aspect of revolutionary politics. The dominant tendency has been to try to offset the risk of failure by managing revolutionary action in line with a pre-given model of revolutionary change – only to limit the range of possibilities for revolutionary engagement. To address this problem, I draw on Rosa (...) Luxemburg, a foremost revolutionary thinker, whose experiences of disappointment led her to rethink the notion of revolutionary commitment as a practice of learning from failure. This rethinking of commitment suggests a different way of engaging with failure – one that expands our imagination of political possibilities beyond the confines of the dominant contemporary responses to left melancholia and enriches their visions of revolutionary change. (shrink)

We develop a model of Disappointment in which disappointment and elation arise from comparing the outcome received, not with an expected value as in previous models, but rather with the other individual outcomes of the lottery. This approach may better reflect the way individuals are liable to experience disappointment. The model obtained accounts for classic behavioral deviations from the normative theory, offers a richer structure than previous disappointment models, and leads to a Rank-Dependent Utility formulation in (...) a transparent way. Thus, our disappointment model may provide a clear psychological rationale for the subjective transformation of probabilities. (shrink)

This essay examines how the disappointment of ex-resistance fighters can illuminate the grey zone of founding—the ambiguity of beginning anew against the background of systemic violence that eludes the predominant linear visions of transition. For a theoretical framework, I draw on Hannah Arendt’s insights into the ambiguity of beginning anew as a practice of attunement that takes oppressive practices as points of departure for democratizing political action. I explore how the ex-resisters’ stories of disappointment can invigorate this practice, (...) focusing on their ability to reorient political action towards reframing unjust relationships in a way that guards against systematic exclusions in the future. This essay demonstrates the political relevance of disappointment on the example of a South African ex-resister’s memoir, Pregs Govender’s Love and Courage. Govender’s narrative discloses how experiences of disappointment can orient the ex-resisters’ efforts to confront the complexities of founding obscured from the official story. (shrink)

Sometimes one’s greatest academic disappointments can have unexpected outcomes. This is especially true when one is trying to change career trajectories or do something that others did not take seriously. My path into neuroethics was an unexpected journey catalyzed in part by constructive disappointment and the disbelief of colleagues who thought that the work I was pursuing nearly two decades prior was a fool’s errand. After all, could anyone—in his or her right mind—ever conceive of waking up a person (...) unconscious from brain injury and getting him to speak?1. (shrink)

Blame skeptics argue that we have strong reason to revise our blame practices because humans do not fulfill all the conditions for it being appropriate to blame them. This paper presents a new challenge for this view. Many have objected that blame plays valuable roles such that we have strong reason to hold on to our blame practices. Skeptics typically reply that non-blaming responses to objectionable conduct, like forms of disappointment, can serve the positive functions of blame. The new (...) challenge is that skeptics need to show that it can be appropriate (or less inappropriate) to respond with this kind of disappointment to people’s conduct if it is inappropriate to respond with blame. The paper argues that current blame-skeptical views fail to meet this challenge. (shrink)

‘Gender disappointment’ is the feeling of sadness when a parent’s strong desire for a child of a certain sex is not realised. It is frequently mentioned as a reason behind parents’ pursuit of sex selection for social reasons. It also tends to be framed as a mental disorder on a range of platforms including the media, sex selection forums and among parents who have been interviewed about sex selection. Our aim in this paper is to investigate whether ‘gender (...) class='Hi'>disappointment’ represents a unique diagnosis. We argue that ‘gender disappointment’ does not account for a unique, distinct category of mental illness, with distinct symptoms or therapy. That said, we recognise that parents’ distress is real and requires psychological treatment. We observe that this distress is rooted in gender essentialism, which can be addressed at both the individual and societal level. (shrink)

Research on intergroup emotions has largely focused on the experience of emotions and surprisingly little attention has been given to the expression of emotions. Drawing on the social-functional approach to emotions, we argue that in the context of intergroup conflicts, outgroup members’ expression of disappointment with one’s ingroup induces the complementary emotion of collective guilt and correspondingly a collective action protesting ingroup actions against the outgroup. In Study 1 conducted immediately after the 2014 Gaza war, Jewish-Israeli participants received information (...) about outgroup’s expression of emotions. As predicted, outgroup’s expression of disappointment increased collective guilt and willingness to participate in collective action, but only among those who saw the intergroup situation as illegitimate. Moreover, collective guilt mediated the relationship between disappointment expression and collective action, moderated, again, by legitimacy perception. In Study 2, we replicated these results in the context of racial tension between Black and White Americans in the US. We discuss the theoretical and applied implications of the findings. (shrink)

The article presents an Internet experiment where subjects sequentially bid for basic gifts and binary-lotteries on these gifts in incentive compatible Vickrey auctions. Subjects exhibit uniformly pessimistic prize-weighting in spite of precautions to reduce suspicion and prohibit collusion. The bids for lotteries are close to the minimal payable value, even when the probability of obtaining a better prize is larger than 50%. Prize-weighting becomes even more conservative as the distance in value of payable prizes increases. The twofold aversive affect appears (...) for three distinct groups of students; we demonstrate, however, that the same subjects overweight small win-probabilities in standard binary-choice. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on Andreas Reckwitz’s considerations on phenomena of ‘exhausted self-realization’ and ‘disappointment’ in The Society of Singularities, as well as in his follow-up volume, The End of Illusions. Under discussion is the range of analytical distinctions that tend to come into play in this area between what one might call a generally primordial concept of self-realization and more derivative articulations of the concept that exhibit various aspects of instrumentalization—variously termed ‘self-maximization’ or ‘self-optimization’. The paper argues that while (...) Reckwitz’s work offers great resources for an understanding of how and why ‘self-realization’ so frequently appears to take on an instrumentalizing character in late-modern social behaviour, the extent to which his work attributes this tendency to a wholly immanent cultural-cognitive logic of lifestyle singularization is open to criticism. The reasons must also be sought from within the more directly economic contexts of diminished material security and solidarity typical of contemporary societies shaped by neoliberal economic governance orders at the level of policy. (shrink)

This paper engages two debates about trust, deriving from two distinct questions about the nature of trust. The first asks how to define trust. Does trusting B to φ involve anything more than relying on B to φ? The second asks about the normative structure of trust. Does trust most fundamentally embody a two-place or a three-place relation? I’ll defend a new position in the second debate that yields an equally new position in the first. The standard three-place model highlights (...) ‘A trusts B to φ.’ The two-place model prefers ‘A trusts B.’ On my new three-place model, both are less fundamental than ‘A φs through trust in B.’ We do, of course, trust people to do things. But the most fundamental form of trust lies in doing something through trust in a person. I call this the Assurance View of trust because I’ll argue that trusting involves accepting another’s invitation to trust – an assurance, in effect, that the other is relevantly trustworthy. Trust thereby differs from mere reliance by how it makes available a reason to rely on the trusted. In mere reliance, your reason to rely on B is exogenous to the reliance relation, emerging, for example, from B’s track record of relevant reliability. When you trust B, by contrast, you take yourself to have a reason to rely on B that is endogenous to your trust, a reason grounded not merely in B’s reliability, exogenously considered, but in B’s ongoing responsiveness to your relevant needs. The Assurance View’s key insight emerges, I’ll argue, from cases wherein trust is disappointed – the trusted does not do what you trusted her to do – yet not thereby betrayed. (shrink)

Many find the prospect of death distressing at least partly because they believe that death deprives its subject of life’s benefits. Properly qualified, the belief is surely true. But should its truth lead us to conclude that there is something dreadful or awful about death, something that merits distress?

‘Gender disappointment’ is regularly reported by those whose child’s sex does not match the sex that they, the parent, desired. With symptoms ranging from mere fleeting sadness to documented cases of serious depression, alienation from one’s child, and emotional suffering, it is clear that so-called ‘gender disappointment’ is a serious issue, that has, as yet, seen little philosophical attention (though see Hendl and Browne 2020). In this chapter I explore gender disappointment, not from the perspective of a (...) parent who ended up with the child of the wrong sex at birth, but rather, from the perspective of a different kind of gender disappointment: the transgender person who grew up and only then disappointed their parents by turning out to be the ‘wrong’ gender. This perspective, I argue, reveals a great deal about the shared gender essentialism at the heart of patriarchal and cissexist ideology. Moreover, I will argue that it reveals the underlying propertarian relationship of parents to their children under contemporary capitalism – a troubling relationship that legitimates the treatment of children as objects to be designed and controlled as commodities at the whims of parents. In this way I disagree with Whyman when he writes that “a preference for having a child of one sex over the other should be considered one of those irrational things of which some sense can nevertheless be made – like aesthetic taste” (Whyman 2021, 113-114). I argue, to the contrary, that the desire for a child of one particular gender is not akin to a mere unproblematic aesthetic preference. Instead, and following the rich feminist tradition of thinking about the patriarchal origins of sexual desire, I argue that we must see these desires as troubling reflections of dominant patriarchal and cissexist ideology, underwritten by a particular neoliberal capitalist mode of production. Moreover, we can seek to change those desires. (shrink)

Philip Yancey has a gift for articulating the knotty issues of faith. In this 25th Anniversary edition of Disappointment with God, Yancey poses three questions that Christians wonder but seldom ask aloud: Is God unfair? Is he silent? Is he hidden? This insightful and deeply personal book points to the odd disparity between our concept of God and the realities of life. Why, if God is so hungry for relationship with us, does he seem so distant? Why, if he (...) cares for us, do bad things happen? What can we expect from him after all? Yancey answers these questions with clarity, richness, and biblical assurance. He takes us beyond the things that make for disillusionment to a deeper faith, a certitude of God's love, and a thirst to reach not just for what God gives, but for who he is. Included in this anniversary edition is a study guide with questions about these perplexing questions of faith that the author confronts. (shrink)

Why did Theodor W. Adorno write Negative Dialectics? In an age where, as Adorno argued in that book, philosophy appears to have become obsolete, answering this question requires reconstructing Adorno's complex views on the role, status, and possibility of philosophical thinking after its “appointment” with its historical hour was missed. This chapter explores this concept of lateness by reconstructing the ways in which Negative Dialectics, indeed all of Adorno's philosophical work, is an exercise in “disappointment.”.

Miranda Fricker appeals to the idea of moral-epistemic disappointment in order to show how our practices of moral appraisal can be sensitive to cultural and historical contingency. In particular, she thinks that moral-epistemic disappointment allows us to avoid the extremes of crude moralism and a relativism of distance. In my response I want to investigate what disappointment is, and whether it can constitute a form of focused moral appraisal in the way that Fricker imagines. I will argue (...) that Fricker is unable to appeal to disappointment as standardly understood, but that there is a more plausible way of understanding the notion that she can employ. There are, nevertheless, significant worries about the capacity of disappointment in this sense to function as a form of moral appraisal. I will argue, finally, that even if Fricker can address these worries, her position might end up closer to moralism than she would like. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Side Stepping The Issues: Disappointment With An Ethics Consult For A Medically High Risk PatientBrent R. CarrMonths of severe symptoms were a blur—hour after hour of suffering. Sleep is her only respite. Her 5-word diagnosis, “treatment-refractory depression with anxious distress,” seemed too orderly, like a flattened 2-dimensional strip of ribbon that simply ironed out all the chaos and confused distress roiling within her. Anyone entering the psychiatric unit (...) early in the morning could hear her near-breathless sobbing, calling for nursing help, repeatedly pleading to anyone who would listen that she was dying. By afternoon, her wheelchair would be situated off to one side of the milieu to prevent agitation of other [End Page 13] patients. From there, she would summon them with small gestures or brief, incessant outbursts to save her, that her body was decaying, withering before them. Such is the torment of nihilistic delusions. She flailed her arms, rocking back and forth, lamenting that no one would help. Although she possessed full leg strength, she refused to stand from the wheelchair, fearing collapse. These distressed pleas were sustained well past each dinner, the anguish echoing from her room, and during her evening shower. Sometimes a pillow-muffled sigh and silence would disclose when her torments became engulfed in sleep.Two years prior, she had a similar episode that lasted almost 3-years. It had failed to respond to months of psychotherapy and more than 15 medication trials. That time, she had cried with happiness after the mental illness went into full remission after only a three-week course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She described this as her miracle. But as miraculous as the ECT was for her, it was problematic. She is a high-risk patient with ongoing hypertension and Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, a condition that leads to an inappropriately fast pulse from aberrant electrical pathways in the heart. During the final week of ECT, she experienced a marked blood pressure surge that led to severe cardiac pathology—Takatsubo’s cardiomyopathy. This is also known as “stress cardiomyopathy” or “broken heart syndrome,” befitting the vexed emotional state she had been in. The cardiomyopathy resembled a myocardial infarct, and it took several months for her to fully recover. Unfortunately, this prevented the use of ECT as a relapse prevention treatment. By one-year post-ECT, her systolic left ventricular dysfunction had resolved, and her ejection fraction (the heart’s pumping efficiency) had normalized.Now, once again, she was treatment-resistant, and ECT was the treatment of choice. The risk stratification for ECT encompassed her prior Takatsubo’s cardiomyopathy, which has a small but known chance for recurrence. This made her a high-risk patient. This risk was convoluted even more by her depression-induced psychosis, wherein she believed that she was dying, that meds were poisoning her, and that ECT would kill her from a heart attack. Before the psychiatric team consulted the ECT service, a mental health court had already ruled regarding her lack of capacity for her medical decisions. The court had authorized her husband as her proxy with authority to consent for her medical care, including for ECT. My role in this case was as the ECT proceduralist from the neuromodulation service who had been consulted by the primary team. The husband was an informed individual and signed consent for ECT. These events all coincided with the primary attending’s departure on scheduled leave. There was now a new covering attending.The resident psychiatrist was apprehensive about ECT and deliberated that the patient was at least able to identify potential risks of ECT—even if exacerbated by a nihilistic delusion. The resident speculated that perhaps the patient should at least be able to refuse ECT, given her previous cardiomyopathy. The newly arrived attending deferred a response regarding her concern and stated it had already been decided by the “team.” This amplified doubt. The medical students sensed the resident’s apprehension and felt confused about whether the patient should receive ECT or not. This dynamic quickly spilled over into nursing discussions, where some were now hesitating about the decision. The cohesiveness of the psychiatry treatment team was compromised... (shrink)

This article explores the conceptual commitments underlying Luxemburg’s repudiation of the discourse of disappointment which had overtaken the European socialist movement during the First World War. My analysis brushes against the grain of the traditional interpretation of Luxemburg’s admonitions ‘to be cheerful despite everything and anything’ as arising from her allegiance to a Marxist philosophy of history which decrees that socialism must inevitably prevail and so refuses to give way to disappointment or despair. The philosophy of history which (...) Luxemburg absorbed from Marx, notably through the Eighteenth Brumaire, prophesies the ultimate victory of socialism but ordains that the actual events and experiences through which this victory is prepared will consist in catastrophes rather than conquests. In Luxemburg, I suggest, we can see more clearly how the experience of failure could make the realization of socialism more rather than less certain, and in terms that refer more directly to the inner situation of the socialist activist than the abstract assurances on which Marx relied: failure occasions the opportunity for deeper learning but, more importantly, it is in the experience of failure that the commitment on which the realization of socialism depends is tested and, in Luxemburg’s hands at least, forged. (shrink)

This paper presents a new decision theory for modelling choice under risk. The new theory is a two-parameter generalization of expected utility theory. The proposed theory assumes that a decision maker: behaves as if maximizing expected utility; but may experience disappointment when the utility of a lottery’s outcome falls short of the expected utility of the lottery; and may have a preference for gambling. The proposed theory can rationalize the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes; the common ratio effect and (...) the reverse thereof ; the Allais paradox in classical common consequence problems and the reverse Allais paradox—in common consequence problems with an even split of a probability mass; violations of the betweenness axiom; switching behavior in the Samuelson’s example; violations of ordinal, upper and lower cumulative independence ; and preference reversals between valuations and choice. In application to insurance, the theory can rationalize full insurance with an actuarially unfair premium and aversion to probabilistic insurance. In application to optimal portfolio investment, the theory can rationalize the equity premium puzzle. (shrink)

This study takes up the phenomenon of disappointment in today's environmental movements. It analyses two distinct streams of environmental movements – neo-environmentalism and the Dark Mountain Project. On the basis of their published written statements, it describes these movements, analyses the opinions of their members regarding possible future developments and examines their ethical motivations. It examines the members’ motivations in terms of three categories – teleological, deontological and virtue ethics – and asserts that each of these contains various expectations, (...) implying varying potential for disappointment. The text's conclusion compares and assesses the attitudes of the members of neo-environmentalism and the Dark Mountain Project, their optimism and pessimism, from the perspective of the philosophers Hans Jonas, Roger Scruton and Romano Guardini. (shrink)

Can one conceive something to say about Allan Bloom’s view of America and the American university that he hasn’t already heard? Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences in what we each saw in our students of the 1960s, I find two regions in which Bloom’s experience and mine differ systematically that are specific and clear enough to be stated briefly, perhaps usefully: first, our experience of the position of philosophy in the intellectual economy we were presented with in the two (...) decades prior to the 1960s; second, our experience of the modern and the popular in the arts. My citing of these differences can only prove worthwhile, however, against a background of agreement I find with his work over the centrality of a cluster of issues, of which I specify five: a first agreement concerns the illustriousness of the university in the life of a democracy; a second concerns the irreplaceability of Great Books—what Thoreau calls scriptures—in a humanistic education; a third concerns the unaware imbibing of European thought by a chronically unprepared American constitution—a condition that is as live for us, or should be, as when Emerson was founding American thinking by demonstrating his knack of inheriting, by transfiguring, European philosophy; a fourth moment of agreement concerns the goal of a democratic university education as keeping open the idea of philosophy as a way of life, call it the life of the mind, a name for which might be Moral Perfectionism ; a fifth sense of my agreement with Bloom concerns the threat that a discourse about such issues, such as the prose fashioned in Bloom’s book , is becoming unintelligible to the culture that has produced it, and not alone to the young . Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism and This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays after Emerson after Wittgenstein. (shrink)

_An intimate, philosophic quest for eternity, amidst the disenchantments and disappointments of our time “Anyone who, in our age of disbelief, longs to believe in God will find Mr. Kronman worth reading.”—Andrew Stark, _Wall Street Journal___ “Aims to persuade America’s ‘relentlessly rational’ elites to acknowledge the existence of ‘divinity.’... Kronman’s ambition is to repair ‘the schism between those for whom religion continues to matter and those who view it with amusement or contempt.’”—Tunku Varadarajan, _Wall Street Journal__ Many people of faith (...) believe the meaning of life depends on our connection to an eternal order of some kind. Atheists deride this belief as a childish superstition. In this wise and profound book, Anthony Kronman offers an alternative to these two entrenched positions, arguing that neither addresses the complexities of the human condition. We can never reach God, as religion promises, but cannot give up the longing to do so either. We are condemned by our nature to set goals we can neither abandon nor fulfill, yet paradoxically are able to approach more closely if we try. The human condition is one of inevitable disappointment tempered by moments of joy. Resolutely humanistic and theologically inspired, this moving book offers a rational path to the love of God amidst the disenchantments of our time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Daring and Disappointing Dreams of Transhumanism's Secular EschatologyMichael Baggot L.C.IntroductionAlthough it is a largely secular movement, contemporary transhumanism borrows heavily from both Christian orthodoxy and heresies to construct a vision for human happiness. This article traces the roots of transhumanism's soteriology and eschatology and then examines the underlying anthropological problems that drive the hoped-for salvation through digital immortality. Unfortunately, the admirable desire to extend life sacrifices an appreciation (...) for the integral harmony of the human person's animal and spiritual dimensions. Since human actions manifest the person's intrinsic corporeality, attempts to detach the human personality from the body through digitalization would produce replicas of the dead without achieving true immortality. The surprising quasi-religious thrust of contemporary transhumanism's secular eschatology presents an opportunity to rediscover the Catholic patrimony's reflection on authentic divinization through the transhumanizing effects of divine grace. The article thus concludes with a Thomistic theosis-centered reorientation of secular transhumanism's eschatological aspirations for immanent immortality toward true human flourishing. [End Page 841]The Secular Eschatology of Contemporary TranshumanismThe leading transhumanist philosopher, Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom, thinks that his movement will provide real solutions to the perennial problems of humanity that traditional religions have tried and failed to address:While not a religion, transhumanism might serve a few of the same functions that people have traditionally sought in religion. It offers a sense of direction and purpose and suggests a vision that humans can achieve something greater than our present condition. Unlike most religious believers, however, transhumanists seek to make their dreams come true in this world, by relying not on supernatural powers or divine intervention but on rational thinking and empiricism, through continued scientific, technological, economic, and human development.1Yet, for all its protests against antiquated creeds, secular transhumanism frequently tends toward quasi-religious expressions. For instance, Meghan O'Gieblyn finds striking parallels between the evangelical and transhumanist worldviews she has embraced and abandoned during her life.2 Her writing explores her harrowing transition from Christian fundamentalism to trans-humanism and her eventual disillusionment with the techno-movement. Bible school had taught her about the various epochs of salvation history and her position within the "dispensation of grace" that marked the final preparation for the longed-for "millennial kingdom." As an adult, she spurned the false promises of organized religion and sought a more rational organization for her life. Later, a book recommendation plunged her into the thought of Google guru Ray Kurzweil and his narrative of evolutionary eras pointing toward an imminent "singularity" in which intelligent machines would emerge from an informational explosion. Such advanced robots would bring digital immortality through mind uploads and a nanotech new earth [End Page 842] that would put Eden to shame. Through his projects, Kurzweil purports to continue the Enlightenment tradition of empirical science and rational rigor. Similarly, many transhumanists tend to follow their Enlightenment predecessors in chiding traditional religion for obscurantist opposition to scientific progress. Nonetheless, O'Gieblyn discovered that the very movement that pretends to supplant the superstitions of the old-time religion is itself "a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology."3The Christian-trained author could not help but detect familiar religious themes in the technocentric movement. Before it spread through the offices of Silicon Valley, the term "transhuman" first appeared in Henry Francis Carey's 1814 version of Dante's Paradiso, where the poet pilgrim recognizes that not even his own genius can describe the joy of risen life when he writes, "words may not tell of that transhuman change."4 Recent efforts to substitute supernatural resurrection with technological advancement find antecedents in the thirteenth-century friar Roger Bacon's quest for an elixir of life. Later, the nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Fedorov claims humans should use technology to control Darwin's unguided evolutionary process. Similarly, the twentieth-century Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin predicted a global machine network that would merge consciousnesses worldwide and prompt the Omega Point of transphysical union with the divine.The Eugenicist Julian Huxley strips such notions of their religious trappings to present a secular transhumanist project that will "overcome limitations…to arrive at... (shrink)

Previous research on the role of negative emotions in social bargaining games has focused primarily on social emotions such as anger and guilt. In this article, we provide a test for behavioural differences between two prototypical decision-related negative emotions—regret and disappointment—in one-shot social dilemma games. Three experiments with two different emotion-induction procedures (autobiographical recall and imagined scenarios) and two different games (the ultimatum game and the 10-coin give-some game) revealed that regret increased prosocial behaviour, whereas disappointment decreased prosocial (...) behaviour. These results extend previous findings concerning differences between regret and disappointment to interdependent (social) situations. (shrink)

The specific heat of hydrogen gas at low temperatures was first measured in 1912 by Arnold Eucken in Walther Nernst’s laboratory in Berlin, and provided one of the earliest experimental supports for the new quantum theory. Even earlier, Nernst had developed a quantum theory of rotating diatomic gas molecules that figured in the discussions at the first Solvay conference in late 1911. Between 1913 and 1925, Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrenfest, Max Planck, Fritz Reiche, and Erwin Schrödinger, among many others, attempted (...) theoretical descriptions of the rotational specific heat of hydrogen, with only limited success. Quantum theory also was central to the study of molecular spectra, where initially it was more successful. Moreover, the two problems interacted in sometimes surprising ways. Not until 1927, following Werner Heisenberg’s discovery of the behavior of indistinguishable particles in modern quantum mechanics, did American theorist David Dennison find a successful theory of the specific heat of hydrogen. (shrink)

The Nietzsche Disappointment confronts Nietzsche's recurrent, symptomatic struggles with causal accounts. His explanations of past and future raise high hopes; when they fail they are responsible for profound disappointment.

I. There was once a happy time—and it was not so very long ago—when it was widely assumed that democracy was the inevitable climax of man's political development, the form of government to which every people aspired and which every society would adopt when it reached the requisite stage of cultural maturity. It was thought that all that had to be done to secure this consummation was to “make the world safe for democracy” by extirpating its natural enemies, such as (...) kings, emperors, assorted nobles, and landed aristocracies. Once these social predators were done for, the people would spontaneously assert their sovereignty, and would proceed to establish their societies and organize their governments on the model of Anglo-American democratic institutions. (shrink)

Decision outcomes sometimes result in negative emotions. This can occur when a decision appears to be wrong in retrospect, and/or when the obtained decision outcome does not live up to expectations. Regret and disappointment are the two emotions that are of central interest in the present article. Although these emotions have a lot in common, they also differ in ways that are relevant to decision making. In this article we review theories and empirical findings concerning regret and disappointment. (...) We first discuss how regret and disappointment differ with respect to their antecedent conditions, appraisals, and phenomenology. We also discuss possible behavioural consequences of experiencing these emotions. Next, we consider how the anticipation of regret and disappointment may influence decision making. We use regret and disappointment theory, developed by the economists Bell (1982, 1985), and Loomes and Sugden (1982, 1986, 1987), as a framework for our discussion. Finally, we argue that combining the theoretical approaches and research paradigms of behavioural decision theory with emotion theories will significantly increase our knowledge of antecedents and consequences of emotions. (shrink)

The article focuses on Jean-Luc Marion’s ‘saturated phenomenon’ by reading it within the context of Husserl’s Logical Investigations. It is argued that Marion’s revision of Husserl must not be understood as a refutation of Husserl but rather as an extension of Husserlian phenomenology. In other words, since Marion needs Husserl and the thesis of intentionality to develop his ideas, the saturated phenomenon affirms the structure of classical phenomenology. This implies corrections of Marion’s description of the saturated phenomenon: the article investigates (...) how the Husserlian idea of ‘disappointment’ (Enttäuschung) is able to elucidate the saturated phenomenon. (shrink)

Sixteen years after his “Foundations of Geometry,” Hilbert published a communication that bears a similar and, by use of the definite article, even less mistakable title: “The Foundations of Physics.” In the opening paragraph of this article, Hilbert announced his intention self-confidently:In the following, I should like to set up — following the axiomatic method — a new system of fundamental equations of physics, constructed essentially from two simple axioms; equations that are of ideal beauty and in which, as I (...) believe, is contained the solution of both Einstein’s and Mie’s problems. (shrink)

This paper provides a commentary on “Vascular amputees: A study in disappointment” and its significance in the development of the disability rights movement, as well as the movements for values-based medicine and person-centred health and social care.

ABSTRACT Ernst Bloch is a philosopher of hope, of this there can be no doubt. It is the fidelity to the proposition that a better world is possible that undergirds Bloch’s work. Yet, the hopeful tenor of Bloch’s philosophy, as I argue here, is accompanied by a second, more subterranean strand: a concern with the phenomenon of disappointment. Bloch has an interest in what happens after hope fails; those moments when the desire for utopia confronts the impossibility of its (...) realisation. By considering Bloch’s philosophical history of the defeat of the chiliastic movements of the medieval moment alongside his ontology of not-yet-being, the claim is made that disappointment has a constitutive role in the philosophy of hope, such that the dream of a new world is mediated through the history of its failures. Hope and disappointment are entangled, the power of the former indexed to the act of confronting the latter. (shrink)

In discussing the ways in which we hold each other accountable for immoral conduct, philosophers have often focused on blame, aiming to specify adequate responses to wrongdoing. In contrast, theorizing about the ways we can appropriately respond to minor moral mistakes – i.e., criticizable conduct that is bad but not wrong – has largely been neglected. My first goal in this paper is, thus, to draw attention to this blind spot and argue that a separate account of blameless moral criticism (...) is desirable. My second goal is to propose one way to explicate the contrast between blaming and blameless moral criticism in terms of the contrast between moral anger and moral disappointment: while moral anger, as many argue, is an appropriate response to moral wrongdoing, moral disappointment, but not moral anger, is an appropriate response to these minor moral mistakes. (shrink)

ignette and autobiographical recall studies have often been used to test models of the appraisals associated with specific emotions. Recently, critiques of both methodologies have called into question the applicability of appraisal theory to naturally-occurring emotional responses. This study examined supporter's responses to Ross Perot's withdrawal from the 1992 presidential race to assess the extent to which appraisal models accurately capture responses to a naturally-occurring event. Supporters in Riverside County, California (N = 227) completed questionnaires concerning their interpretations of the (...) event, their initial emotional reactions, changes in their reactions in the weeks immediately following Perot's withdrawal, and their plans. Appraisal models correctly predicted the dimensions of agency and coping potential that served to differentiate sadness from anger, and the appraisals and plans associated with hope. Appraisal models did not predict the strong focus of sad supporters on their past goals and beliefs, and the plans associated with sadness and anger. Changes in emotional intensity occurred as a function of changes in goals and plans rather than merely as a function of time. These findings demonstrate the applicability of appraisal theory to naturally-occurring emotional responses, but also show that models may understate the complexity of the planning processes associated with emotions. (shrink)