Description:

Talk Title: "Motivating Practical Hope"

Hope is often thought to play an important motivational role in sustaining practical pursuits under difficult conditions. The chapter aims to identify the source of the motivational problem and how hope solves that motivational problem. The chapter rejects the most obvious account of the motivational problem’s source--the agent’s belief that the odds of success are low. Locating the motivational problem in the agent’s belief that the odds are low yields unattractive accounts of how hope works to sustain practical pursuits and fails to explain why there is a motivational problem. I suggest an alternative account in terms of our phenomenological idea of the future and an account of how hope works to motivate difficult pursuits.

Cheshire Calhoun is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, and chair of the Board of the American Philosophical Association. She writes and teaches in the areas of moral psychology, ethics, and feminist philosophy. The topics of her published essays include shame, integrity, moral failure, meaningful living, and intimidation. She has a new book forthcoming Doing Valuable Time: The Present, the Future, and Meaningful Living (Oxford UP) from which her lecture on hope is drawn.