The nature of hope

Ratio

Volumn 22, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 216-233

  Meirav, Ariel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA   (Israel)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849096087     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2009.00427.x     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Stewart Sutherland notes the popularity of a view of hope which suggests such cynicism, quoting Samuel Johnson, J. B. Priestley, and Benjamin Franklin. See S. Sutherland, 'Hope', in The Philosophy of Christianity, Supplement to Philosophy, edited by G. Vesey, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 193
2. Versions of the Standard Account may be found in: J. Wheatley, 'Wishing and Hoping', Analysis, 18 (1958), pp. 121-131
3. R. Downie, 'Hope', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 24 (1963), pp. 248-251
4. J. Day, 'Hope', American Philosophical Quarterly, 6 (1969), pp. 89-102
5. H. Price, Belief (Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 268-2/4
6. M. Quinn, 'Hoping', Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1976), pp. 53-65
7. J. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope (Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), ch. 5
8. These proposals are due, respectively, to L. Bovens, 'The Value of Hope', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59 (1999), pp. 667-681
9. and P. Pettit, 'Hope and its Place in Mind', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592 (2004), pp. 152-165
10. See Day. 'Hope', p. 98
11. Note that he uses 'wish' and 'thought', instead of 'desire' and 'belief' Day expands on and restates his account in Hope: A Philosophical Inquiry (Societas Philosophica Fennica, 1991)
12. and 'More about Hope and Fear', Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 1 (1998), 121-123
13. Wheatley's ('Wishing and Hoping', pp. 126-7) view that hope requires the belief that the prospect is more likely than not is clearly untypical
14. A very helpful explanation of these distinctions may be found in D. Mellor, Probability: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2005). ch. 1
15. A. Phillips Griffiths, 'Certain Hope', Religious Studies, 26 (1990), 453-461
16. See Bovens, 'The Value of Hope', 667-9
17. For an explanation of this approach to the assessment of subjective probability, see M. Kaplan, Decision Theory as Philosophy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 1, esp. p. 15
18. Gabriel Marcel, in Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. by E. Craufurd (Chicago, Henry Regnery Company, 1951), pp. 44-5, suggests that if I 'wish ardently' for something I will represent it to my self imaginatively, whereas hope, ideally at least, 'transcends imagination'. Thus he seems to be claiming that (ideal) hope is incompatible with such ardent wishing. This, however, is not to deny that hope involves desire, for desire need not take the form of ardent wishing
19. Josef Pieper, in Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1997), p. 102, says that hope combines the two virtues of magnanimity and humility, where he explains the first as an aspiration to what is possible, and the second as the acknowledgement that this possibility is not something that our own powers can guarantee: 'Magnanimity directs this hope to its true possibilities; humility, with its gaze fixed on the infinite distance between man and God, reveals the limitations of these possibilities and preserves them from sham realization and for true realization.'
20. Victoria McGeer speaks of the way hope involves an awareness that one's agencv is limited. See her 'The Art of Good Hope', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 592 (2004), pp. 100-127, at pp. 103-5