In this article I argue that hope is rightly numbered by Hesiod among the evils, as hope cannot be separated from an awareness of the inadequacy of one's current state. Political hope for democrats in particular is tied to the awareness that we have not yet realized ourselves, that, to paraphrase Pindar, we have not yet become who we are. I argue that, although Rorty comes close to articulating this in his book Achieving Our Country, his emphasis on pride ultimately (...) obscures more than it reveals. I conclude that Thoreau's anguished reflection in Walden on the failures of his fellow citizens is a better place to look for instruction on the question of political hope. (shrink)

This article considers the question ‘What makes hope rational?’ We take Adrienne Martin’s recent incorporation analysis of hope as representative of a tradition that views the rationality of hope as a matter of instrumental reasons. Against this tradition, we argue that an important subset of hope, ‘fundamental hope’, is not governed by instrumental rationality. Rather, people have reason to endorse or reject such hope in virtue of the contribution of the relevant attitudes to the integrity of their practical identity, which (...) makes the relevant hope not instrumentally but intrinsically valuable. This argument also allows for a new analysis of the reasons people have to abandon hope and for a better understanding of non-fundamental, ‘prosaic’ hopes. (shrink)

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)

I argue that hope is a virtue insofar as it leads to a more realistic view of the future than dispositions like optimism and pessimism, promotes courage, and encourages an important kind of solidarity with others. In light of this proposal, I consider the relationship between hope and our beliefs about what is good as well as the conditions under which hope may fail to be a virtue.

This paper seeks to address what I claim are competing utopian and anti-utopian impulses within educational discourse aimed at formulating a just and fair conception of public education. On the one hand, there is a tendency to prescribe concrete utopias – normative blueprints that claim to portent how a redeemed public education will (and ought to) be. On the other hand, there is the tendency to prescribe material revolutions – strategic blueprints that dictate the kinds of political action that educators (...) must undertake in order to bring about lasting social change. I argue that both of these approaches to formulating a just conception of public education are flawed for pragmatic as well as normative reasons. As a way of avoiding the pitfalls inherent to utopianism and anti-utopianism, I suggest that those of us interested in a just conception of education maintain our focus on a kind of pragmatic utopianism. While pragmatic utopianism requires that we abandon the notion that we can ever know what a redeemed public education will look like in its particulars, it does set out standards of deliberation that can increase the likelihood that we will be able to address issues of educational justice as they arise. (shrink)