Human beings have a natural and necessary interest in the prospects of their happiness, their moral improvement, and a progressively more just world. When, to what extent, and on what basis our hope for these things could be reasonable have been central questions in philosophy of religion since the Enlightenment. But genocides and cultural devastation (e.g., the Holocaust or the fates of some Indigenous communities) have compelled more recent philosophers to ask not only about rational hope, but also radical hope. This course explores reasonable and radical hope, first by unpacking the well-established philosophical question of our what we may reasonably expect from ourselves and our world, and then turning to the issue of humans’ capacity to persist when their community and its culture face extinction, i.e., when they may no longer expect anything.
Human beings have a natural and necessary interest in the prospects of their happiness, their moral improvement, and a progressively more just world. When, to what extent, and on what basis our hope for these things could be reasonable have been central questions in philosophy of religion since the Enlightenment. But genocides and cultural devastation (e.g., the Holocaust or the fates of some Indigenous communities) have compelled more recent philosophers to ask not only about rational hope, but also radical hope. This course explores reasonable and radical hope, first by unpacking the well-established philosophical question of our what we may reasonably expect from ourselves and our world, and then turning to the issue of humans’ capacity to persist when their community and its culture face extinction, i.e., when they may no longer expect anything.
