Hope: Conceptual and normative issues

Abstract

Hope is often seen as at once valuable and dangerous: it can fuel our motivation in the face of challenges, but can also distract us from reality and lead us to irrationality. How can we learn to "hope well," and what does "hoping well" involve? Contemporary philosophers disagree on such normative questions about hope and also on how to define hope as a mental state. This article explores recent philosophical debates surrounding the concept of hope and the norms governing hope. It also underlies hope's significance for the philosophy of emotion and the ethics of interpersonal relations. 1 | INTRODUCTION Our hopes are multifarious, ranging from the mundane or the prosaic to the life-shaping or the profound: we hope that it won't rain tomorrow, hope for success in our personal endeavors, hope to be cured from life-threatening diseases, and hope that we will somehow overcome the climate crisis. At bottom, is there anything that sets apart our "deepest" hopes from more superficial ones? Or do all hopes, including even the kind we "invest" in other people, in fact share the same underlying nature? Since hope is often portrayed as both valuable and dangerous, questions about its nature take on special significance. We are indeed often told to "never give up hope"; that "there is always room for hope," while also being warned against the possibility of entraining "false hopes," somehow divorced from reality and potentially leading to disastrous outcomes. But without knowing what hope is, how can we aspire to hope well? And what does "hoping well" even mean? Until quite recently, conceptual and normative questions about hope hadn't received much attention within the analytic tradition. This could be due, as Pettit (2004, p. 54) suggests, to the influence of a conception of hope emerging in the Modern period (notably in the works of Hobbes and Hume), according to which all hope consists in the combination of a desire for an outcome and the belief that outcome is possible but not certain. 1 If all there is to hope is "desire in the context of epistemic uncertainty," 2 then hope might not seem worthy of a standalone philosophical investigation. Attitudes toward hope's philosophical significance have now shifted, however, while hope also figures prominently in current public discourse. 3 This article aims to take stock of these recent philosophical developments. Section 2 turns to descriptive questions about the nature of hope, centering on the relationship between hope, desire, and the emotions, while Section 3 focuses on various evaluative measures used for assessing hope, in

Incels, autism, and hopelessness: affective incorporation of online interaction as a challenge for phenomenological psychopathology

“…First of all, we can make a distinction between two different types of hope: intentional and pre-intentional (or “radical”). Despite the increasing philosophical interest in hope, most work on the topic deals with what might be called “intentional hope,” hope for something ( Bovens, 1999 ; Meirav, 2009 ; for an overview, see Rioux, 2021 ). Taking the incel cases as a guide, the corresponding intentional objects might vary in their determinacy but, all in all, whether one hopes to have a girlfriend or to have sex, there is some state of affairs that one hopes will occur.…”

العزم الأكاديمي والإرادة كمنبئات بالأمل لدى طلاب كلية التربية جامعة بنها

“…‫ادية‬ ‫اإلر‬ ‫المكونات‬ ‫وبعض‬ ، (Ahmed, 2021;Ferrari et al, 2012 (Duckworth, 2018;Okur et al, 2023, Pennings et al, 2015 (Ahmed, 2021;Duckworth & Gross, 2014;Oriol et al, 2017;Kevenaar et al, 2023;Rioux, 2021) .…”