From Disappointment to Bitterness and Back

Workshop "From Disappointment to Bitterness and Back”

From 27 August 2025 to 29 August 2025, we will host the workshop "From Disappointment to Bitterness and Back" at the University of Vienna. 

With this workshop, we hope to delve deep into the topic of bitterness and disappointment within social and moral philosophy. We would like to focus on the following questions:

• What exactly is bitterness and what is disappointment (Brady 2010; Fricker 2010)? Are they emotions, moods, character traits, dispositions, or conditions?

• What causes bitterness and disappointment, and in what contexts do they emerge? What is the relation betweenbitterness and disappointment? What triggers these affective responses – is it anger, injustice, or humiliation? 

• How do bitterness and disappointment connect to other notions like grievances, resentment (e.g., Hampton and Murphy, 1988; Walker 2006; Brudholm, 2008), or Nietzschean/Schelerian ressentiment (e.g., Aeschbach, 2017; Huddleston, 2021; Fleury, 2023; Vendrell-Ferran, 2023)

• How can we make sense of the sociality of bitterness? Does bitterness isolate individuals, making it harder for them to form friendships, or can it foster a sense of connection when shared experiences of bitterness align? 

• How do bitterness and disappointment affect an individual's worldview and perception? How cognitively-laden are these states? Does bitterness require memory and the recollection of past wrongs? Must bitterness build over time, or can it be a spontaneous reaction to certain “bitter events”? 

• What are the normative underpinnings of bitterness and disappointment? Is there a distinctive kind of moral disappointment (Brady 2010; Fricker 2010; Schönherr 2023; Telech and Katz 2022) and moral bitterness? If so, when can we consider this to be warranted, justified, fitting and/or appropriate (cf. Menges 2020)? 

• How do disappointment and bitterness influence moral reasoning and moral cognition? And how is bitterness relevant for second-personal morality (Darwall 2006 & 2024; cf. Pauer-Studer 2014)? For example, does bitterness impact in any way one’s authority to make claims and demands on others? Does bitterness in some form or another affect one’s standing in the moral community?

The workshop will have the following keynote speakers: 

• Prof. Michael Brady (University of Glasgow)

• Prof. Íngrid Vendrell-Ferran (Philipps Universität Marburg) and Assoc. Prof. Thomas Brudholm (University of Copenhagen)

• Prof. Herlinde Pauer-Studer (University of Vienna)

We invite submissions for the remaining 9 open presentation slots. Each participant will be allotted an hour in total, with 30 to 40 minutes reserved for presentation. Please send your anonymized abstract (300 to 500 words) to [email protected] by the end of 1 March, 2025. We aim to provide a decision early April. 

We look forward to your submission.

Kind regards,

Prof. Hans Bernhard Schmid, Dr. Niels de Haan, and Leah Jule Ritterfeld