I argue for a novel answer to the question “What is hope?”. On my view, rather than aiming for a compound account, i.e. analysing hope in terms of desire and belief, we should understand hope as an irreducible concept. After criticizing influential compound accounts of hope, I discuss Segal and Textor's alternative of describing hope as a primitive mental state. While Segal and Textor argue that available developments of the standard definition do not offer sufficient conditions for hope, I question the deep‐seated idea that desire and belief are even necessary conditions for hope. My suggestion is that we should take seriously the fact that we hope in a great variety of ways and should question the search for elements that are common to all cases. A promising alternative follows the Wittgensteinian idea that cases of hope are related in terms of family resemblance, i.e. are multiply realizable on the ontological level while falling under the non‐definable concept of hope.
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. IntroductionIn this article, we want to examine the question 'What makes hope rational?' While much of the current literature on hope focuses on the instrumental rationality of hope, we suggest that instrumental considerations do not exhaust the reasons we can have to hope. To make this argument, we focus on hopes that play a crucial role in how people see and interpret their own lives. Such hopes, even though they may also promote the interests of the relevant agent, are rational primarily because they are constitutive of her practical identity. We call this kind of hope 'fundamental hope', and we argue that the existence of this kind of hope poses a challenge to contemporary theories of hope.Our argument proceeds from Adrienne Martin's recent account of the rationality of hope (Section 1). Martin suggests that what makes hope rational is the practical benefit of engaging in hopeful activities. We argue in Section 2 that this instrumentalism does not fully capture the value of hope.
We report on photocurrent spectroscopy on undoped GaAs/AlGaAs semiconductor superlattices subjected to femtosecond optical excitation. The evolution of the carrier-drift-induced inhomogeneity of the electric field is studied by tracing the shifting and broadening of Wannier-Stark transitions as a function of delay time and bias field. Based on experimental data and results of numerical simulations, we find that the superlattice rapidly splits into two moving field regions, one with strong field gradient and low electron density, the other with partially screened field at low gradient and high electron density. Concerning future Bloch-gain measurements, we find that gain is expected in spite of the inhomogeneous field if the electron-rich region is not heavily screened. The time window during which Bloch gain exists is determined by the sweep out of the electrons (10-30 ps)
The aim of this paper is to suggest that a necessary condition of autonomy has not been sufficiently recognized in the literature: the capacity to critically reflect on one's practical attitudes (desires, preferences, values, etc.) in the light of new experiences. It will be argued that most prominent accounts of autonomy-ahistorical as well as historysensitive-have either altogether failed to recognize this condition or at least failed to give an explicit account of it.
The language of hope is a ubiquitous part of political life, but its value is increasingly contested. While there is an emerging debate about hope in political philosophy, an assessment of the prevalent scepticism about its role in political practice is still outstanding. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of historical and recent treatments of hope in political philosophy and to indicate lines of further research. We argue that even though political philosophy can draw on recent analyses of hope in analytic philosophy, there are distinct challenges for an account of hope in political contexts. Examples such as racial injustice or climate change show the need for a systematic normative account that is sensitive to the unavoidability of hope in politics as much as its characteristic dangers.The language of hope is ubiquitous in political life. Citizens hope for their cause or candidate to prevail, activists describe their fight against oppression and injustice as bolstered by shared hopes, politicians invoke hope to galvanise support. Yet, even in political discourse the value of hope no longer remains undisputed. Politicians who take on the growing disaffection by invoking hope are readily accused of leading people down the primrose path with empty rhetoric. 1 Citizens wonder which hopes can still be shared in societies characterised by deep disagreement about values and worldviews. And activists engaged in the fight against global warming prefer to instil an unvarnished fear of the imminent climate catastrophe rather than a hopeful outlook that might lead people to lean back complacently. 2 While there is an emerging debate about hope in political philosophy, an assessment of the prevalent scepticism about its role in political practice is still outstanding. In this article, we first give an overview of recent debates about the nature of hope in general (Section 1) as well as a number of critiques of hope specifically in political contexts (Section 2). Indicating lines of further research, we then zoom in on three distinct challenges for a systematic
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