In this article I examine the role of anxiety in our motivation to reassess our epistemic states, by taking as a starting point a proposal put forward by Levy, according to which anxiety is responsible for the ruminations and worries about threatening possibilities that we sometimes get caught up into in our everyday life. Levy’s claim is that these irrational persistent thoughts about possible states of affairs are best explained by anxiety, rather than by beliefs, degrees of belief, or other (...) mental states. I will take Levy’s article as a starting point into my study of the role of anxiety in our inclinations to question the epistemic quality of our cognitive states. While I believe that Levy is right in directing our attention to the role of anxiety in these cases, his claim calls for further explanation into the nature of anxiety, and into the mechanisms through which anxiety generates these doubts. Although the relation between anxiety and doubt has already been highlighted, there has been little effort to elaborate on the mechanisms through which an affective state like anxiety generates a motivation to reassess our beliefs. This paper is an attempt at providing such an elaboration. Clarifying the role of anxiety in these phenomena will lead me to revise a common assumption about the interactions between anxiety and higher-level cognitive processes, such as the ones involved in representing hypothetical threatening scenarios through mental imagery. (shrink)

In much environmentally concerned literature, there is a burgeoning concern for the status and sustainability of human hope. Within Christian circles, this attention has often taken the form of eschatological reflection. While there is important warrant for attention to eschatology in Christian examinations of hope, I claim that to move so quickly from hope to eschatology is to confuse a species of Christian hope for a definition of hope itself; as such, it is important for theological ethicists to examine hope (...) also from the experiential perspective of the human hoper. In particular, this is important today given the shortcomings of an eschatological focus in addressing anxieties arising due to the environmental crisis. Through examining hope as a fallible human activity, one can come to better understand hope's importance to human life, its profound ambiguity, and the potential threat that the environmental crisis poses to it. (shrink)

This work aims to identify the constituents of forgiveness in terms of the forgiver's beliefs and motivating goals. After addressing the antecedents of forgiveness—a perceived wrong—and distinguishing the notion of mere harm from that of offense, we describe the victim's typical retributive reactions—revenge and resentment—and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Then we focus on the forgiver's mind-set, pointing to the relationship between forgiveness and acceptance of the wrong, addressing the forgiver's motivating goals, and discussing both their self-interested and altruistic implications. (...) In so doing we also discuss the role of the forgiver's positive feelings towards the offender, arguing that, however important, they are unnecessary to forgiveness. We finally identify two kinds of forgiveness—conditional and unconditional—suggesting that they are grounded on different notions of “worth.”. (shrink)

Hope is a ubiquitous feature of human experience, but there has been relatively little scholarship within contemporary analytic philosophy devoted to the systematic analysis of its nature and value. In the last decade, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of hope and, in particular, its role in human agency. This scholarly attention reflects an ambivalence about hope's effects. While the possession of hope can have salutary consequences, it can also make the agent vulnerable to certain (...) kinds of personal risk. The pervasiveness of hope is not a sign of its quality; only a well‐tuned hope can be a virtue. Recently, Nancy Snow has argued that hope can be an intellectual virtue. Framing her account as a contribution to regulative epistemology, she contends that the intellectual virtue of hope can (i) motivate the pursuit of important epistemic ends, (ii) create dispositions that enable the successful pursuit of these aims, and (iii) generate a method for enduring intellectual projects. In this paper, I provide a critical appraisal of Snow's account of hope as an intellectual virtue. One important implication of this critique is that hope can function as an intellectual virtue only to the extent that it has benefitted from the correcting and perfecting influence of other cognitive excellences. (shrink)

Fear is a social phenomenon that develops in people facing a crisis, such as a pandemic. For instance, the entire world is currently exposed to Covid-19 pandemic, causing great fear. In the Bible, Jesus’ disciples were terrified of sinking in their boat during a storm. Although these two scenarios are different, the response is the same. Fear produces stress and anxiety disorders when not appropriately managed. This paper examines the causes of fear and how they can be addressed. Specifically, the (...) study involves determining the cause of fear and proposing a strategy based on Hope, as described by Erich in the book Revolution of Hope which positively correlates with building fortitude and endurance. Surrendering or persisting is a dialectical choice, though theology fear does not give chances. Instead, Humans only survive by depending on God. This research was involved literature reviews by utilizing reference sources, including books, journal articles, and other scientific content. (shrink)

Aristotle tries to solve the riddle of future-directedness and luck-awareness by offering an account of what he calls ‘good hope’ or hoping-well. I concede that hope does not hold Aristotle’s attention for long. However, his allusions to hope (in the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and the Rhetoric) allow us to articulate a quite detailed, illuminating, and rich phenomenology of hope that will prove to be decisive when inquiring into how hopefulness belongs to the core of practical life, thereby making (...) an important contribution to contemporary discussions of hope. (shrink)

Brand rumors can harm brands’ image and bring significant impacts on customers’ decision-making and sharing behavior. Finding practical strategies for preventing the spread of brand rumors continues to be a challenge. Building on the social contagion theory, the current research enriches the discussion on understanding why people spread rumors and how to deal with the spreading of rumors. Sharing brand rumors is motivated by a variety of complex psychological reasons, but prior research didn’t adequately analyze the problem from a complexity (...) perspective. Therefore, using a sample of 416 interviewers within eight types of brand rumors, this study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the combination of rumor psychological communication motivations in brand activities and solutions to prevent the spread of brand rumors. The current study discoveries three and two first-level configurational solutions, respectively, that can promote positive and negative rumor spreading. To summarize, emotional stimulation is a key component in the spread of rumors; altruism and relationship management motivation can coexist at times; and untrusted rumors are disseminated through other motivation factors. Solutions to prevent rumors from spreading are also provided. Furthermore, the findings help to understand the psychology of configurational motivation and how it can help brands reduce the spread of brand rumors. Finally, these discoveries’ theoretical contributions and practical implications are presented. (shrink)

In this essay, I introduce religious naturalism as one contemporary religious response to anthropogenic climate change; in so doing, I offer a concept of hope associated with the beauty of ignorance, of not knowing ourselves in the usual manner. Reframing humans as natural processes in relationship with other forms of nature, religious naturalism encourages humans’ processes of transformative engagement with each other and with the more‐than‐human worlds that constitute our existence. Hope in this context is anticipating what possibilities may occur (...) when human organisms enact our evolutionary capacities as relational organisms who can love, engaging in multilayered processes of changing behaviors, values, and relationships that promote the betterment of myriad nature. (shrink)