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.

The distinguished author of books on psychology, ethics, and politics, John Dewey specialized in the philosophy of education. In this landmark work on public education, Dewey discusses methods of providing quality public education in a democratic society. First published close to 90 years ago, Democracy and Education sounded the call for a revolution in education, stressing growth, experience, and activity as factors that promote a democratic character in students and lead to the advancement of self and society. Unabridged reproduction of (...) the classic 1916 edition. (shrink)

Philosophers and social scientists have focussed a great deal of attention on our human capacity to trust, but relatively little on the capacity to hope. This is a significant oversight, as hope and trust are importantly interconnected. This paper argues that, even though trust can and does feed our hopes, it is our empowering capacity to hope that significantly underwrites—and makes rational—our capacity to trust.

Hope obeys Aristotle's doctrine of the mean: one should neither hope too much, nor too little. But what determines what constitutes too much and what constitutes too little for a particular person at a particular time? The sceptic presents an argument to the effect that it is never rational to hope. An attempt to answer the sceptic leads us in different directions. Decision-theoretic and preference-theoretic arguments support the instrumental value of hope. An investigation into the nature of hope permits us (...) to assess the intrinsic value of hope. However, it must be granted to the sceptic that there is a tension between hope and epistemic rationality. I conclude with some reflections about the relationship between hope and character features that are constitutive of inner strength. (shrink)

Hoping is an integral part of what it is to be human, and its significance for education has been widely noted. Hope is, however, a contested category of human experience and getting to grips with its characteristics and dynamics is a difficult task. The paper argues that hope is not a singular undifferentiated experience and is best understood as a socially mediated human capacity with varying affective, cognitive and behavioural dimensions. Drawing on the philosophy, theology and psychology of hope, five (...) modes of hoping are outlined: patient, critical, sound, resolute and transformative. The key aim of the paper is to illustrate how different modes of hoping are associated with different pedagogical strategies. Phrased differently, the paper seeks to delineate a range of pedagogies of hope. The phrase ‘pedagogy of hope’ is very much associated with critical theory—one thinks instantly of, for example, Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux or bell hooks. There are many pedagogies of hope, however, and an explicitly conservative text such as William Bennett’s Book of Virtues has as strong a claim to the title as Freire’s radical and utopian ideas. A broader argument, therefore, is that there is nothing inherently radical or subversive about a pedagogy of hope. Pedagogies of hope can serve to reproduce social relations as well as to transform them. (shrink)

Many teachers struggle to maintain or build hope among themselves and their students in today’s climate of high anxiety and low morale. This article describes and responds to those challenging conditions. It offers teachers and scholars of education a philosophically sophisticated and feasible understanding of hope. This notion of hope is grounded in pragmatism and grows out of the pragmatist commitment to meliorism. Hope is described as a way of living tied to specific contexts that brings together reflection and intelligent (...) action alongside imagination and gratitude. Such hope is realistic and generative, rendering it well suited for teachers struggling in schools today. The article does account for some school conditions, including fatalism, passivity, and lack of persistent motivation, that pose obstacles for achieving pragmatist hope. The article closes by describing specific actions teachers can take to build and sustain hope in their schools, including developing supportive communities of inquiry, cultivating habits of hope among students, and practicing confirmation. (shrink)

Too often, hope is described in individualist terms and in ways that do not help us understand contemporary democracy or offer ways to improve it. Instead, I develop an account of hope situated within pragmatist philosophy that is rooted in the experiences of individuals and grows out of real life circumstances, yet cannot be disconnected from social and political life. This account can help us to better face current political struggles related to hopelessness and despair, all the while building democratic (...) identity. To examine the ways in which shared hoping and the content of our hopes shape our identity and our work together in democracy, I consider both how and what we hope in political contexts. (shrink)

Recently, due in part to the research of Angela Duckworth, the cultivation of dispositions in education, grit in particular, has gained the attention of educational policymakers and the educational research community. While much of the research has focused on how to detect grit, there has been little discussion regarding how grit came to be valued as a noncognitive disposition and what its recent prominence might tell us about current social conditions. In this essay, Ariana Gonzalez Stokas attempts to illuminate grit (...) as a concept that has undergone a number of conceptual transformations in American culture. She seeks to show how grit developed as a way to justify social and economic inequality and how this history is bound up in its conceptual structure. Through conducting a genealogical excavation, Stokas reveals the relationship of grit to a cluster of cultural events that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century in the confluence of boxing, cowboys, and Theodore Roosevelt, and aims to illuminate how grit has served as a tool for convincing society that achievement occurs through heroic individual effort despite inadequate social supports. This historical understanding of grit, Stokas concludes, may help us to recognize that the energy and resources currently spent on cultivating grit in children would be better spent on ameliorating the problems of social and economic inequality. (shrink)

Review of Colin Koopman’s Pragmatism as Transition. Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey and Rorty. The review stresses and discusses the implications of what is taken as the main thesis of the book, namely that the most useful way to understand pragmatism is to read it from the point of view of meliorism.

Racial inequality remains a persistent feature of American life. Despite the prominent place the idea of equality holds in the tradition of political philosophy, we remain without an effective conception appropriate for the experience of racial inequality. In this paper, I re-frame debates around equality and egalitarianism by reflecting on some of James Baldwin's more strident arguments in his 1965 debate with William Buckley. I suggest he presses two complaints that are fundamental to racial inequality: the complaints of democratic distance (...) and of disaffection. I then argue that while contemporary egalitarian theorists such as G. A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Richard Arneson, and Elizabeth Anderson all claim to have isolated in their work a preferred conception of equality, they are unable to respond to Baldwin's complaints, thus unable to effectively address the experience of racial inequality. I then leverage Bernard Williams's distinction between a technological view of equality and a human view alongside his writing on imagination to offer a framework for meeting the moral demands that arise from taking the experience of racial inequality as fundamental to considerations over social and political equality. (shrink)

What is hope? Though variously characterized as a cognitive attitude, an emotion, a disposition, and even a process or activity, hope, more deeply, a unifying and grounding force of human agency. We cannot live a human life without hope, therefore questions about the rationality of hope are properly recast as questions about what it means to hope well. This thesis is defended and elaborated as follows. First, it is argued that hope is an essential and distinctive feature of human agency, (...) both conceptually and developmentally. The author then explores a number of dimensions of agency that are critically implicated in the art of hoping well, drawing on several examples from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The article concludes with a short section that suggests how hoping well in an individual context may be extended to hope at the collective level. (shrink)