Volume 60, Issue 1 -

It is argued that an attractive version of naturalism may be characterized by five theses: 1. There is no substantial evidence that there are supernatural entities or forces that have an effect on the world. 2. The core of the modern scientific world view – the theory of atoms that tells us that all things in the world are made up of atoms and molecules and that all properties of any object can be explained by reference to the atoms it consists of and their spatial arrangement – is a very well confirmed empirical theory. 3. There is no methodological a priori to the effect that science is limited to the investigation of natural facts and to explanations that only refer to natural phenomena. 4. The scientific image of the world is not in conflict with the manifest image, it is rather an enlargement and an improvement of this image. 5. In case of seeming conflict, it is not a good idea to assume that there are aspects of reality that are beyond the scope of science or that above the natural world which is accessible to science there is another world in which things are different from what science tells us. Whatever the manifest image of the world tells us about reality must be compatible with what science tells about it. It is further argued that there are very good reasons to accept all these five theses as true.

Is hope in need of reasons? Cognitivist accounts of hope tend to answer this question in the affirmative, thereby taking hope to be of a belief-like nature and responsive to reasons. Non-cognitivist accounts of hope, by contrast, tend to give a negative answer, thereby taking hope to be a non-cognitive emotion and insensitive to reasons. Ernst Bloch, however, offers a more balanced account of hope in which hope is featured both as an emotion and a virtue (docta spes). This means that hope is different from belief but in need of support by reasons nonetheless, at least in its virtuous form. This double nature of hope can be brought out and defended by comparing Bloch’s conception of hope to the account of hope that Thomas Aquinas develops in which hope is both an emotion and a religious virtue (virtus infusa) and responsive to religious beliefs. Both accounts stand in sharp contrast to William James who takes hope to be a possible basis for beliefs instead. The paper explores the three conceptions of hope and also discusses the conceptual difficulty of how something can be both an emotion and a virtue. What is needed here is a non-Aristotelian conception of passive virtues.

Kant and Adorno alike have assumed that hope plays a central role in the relation between ethics and happiness. After comparing some of their different interpretations of hope, this paper traces the phil¬osophical account of the concept of hope which Kant and Adorno, however, agree on. They both see hope as essential for bridging the gulf between normativity and realities. Hope, they argue, features a weaker doxastic state than belief but a stronger one than wishful thinking. For Kant, the question “what may I hope? ” is part of the interests of human reason. By modifying this conception of hope, Adorno advocates a notion of hope, which accounts for a critique of religion and metaphysics.

Medieval philosophers took hope to be an emotion with a cognitive content. It is precisely this content, they argued, that makes it an intentional phenomenon. But how is its specific content to be characterized? How is it to be distinguished from the content of other emotions? And what kind of cognitive activities are required to produce it? This paper discusses these questions, focusing on Thomas Aquinas’ and William of Ockham’s explanatory models. It pays particular attention to the role these authors ascribed to intellect and will, the two rational faculties. While Aquinas defended an intellectualist view, claiming that it is the intellect alone that fixes the cognitive content and brings about hope, Ockham subscribed to a voluntarist view, affirming that the will always needs to give its assent to the content presented by the intellect. Given this disagreement, they gave different accounts of the responsibility we have for rational as well as irrational forms of hope.

Hope is a neglected topic in philosophy. This article tries to show that hope belongs to the human form of life. We start with Wittgenstein’s remark that human beings hope, while crocodiles cannot and explore the nature of hoping via three different routes: Firstly, we discuss the question whether hope is an emotion or a more or less rational attitude. Secondly, we put forward five characteristics of hope: the possibility of that which is hoped for, the temporality of the object of hope, the connection of hope and action, hope and passivity, and hope’s connection to language. Finally, we address the main counterarguments against the value of hope and argue that hope plays an important role in the ability to lead a human life, despite all the criticism it has received in philosophical thinking.

What is hope? Though variously characterized as a cognitive attitude, an emotion, a disposition, and even a process or activity, I argue that it is, more deeply, a unifying and grounding force of human agency. Since we cannot live a human life without hope, questions about the rationality of hope are properly recast as questions about what it means to hope well. This thesis is defended and elaborated in four parts. In the first two sections, I argue that hope is an essential and distinctive feature of human agency, both conceptually and developmentally. I then explore 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 . I conclude with a short section that suggests how hoping well in an individual context may be extended to hope at the collective level.

Zusammenfassung Ansgar Beckermann: Einführung in die Logik. Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 3. Aufl., Berlin 2011, 382 S. Franz von Kutschera/Alfred Breitkopf: Einführung in die moderne Logik. Verlag Karl Alber, 8. Aufl., Freiburg 2007, 220 S. Winfried Löffler: Einführung in die Logik. Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2008, 273 S. Graham Priest: Einführung in die nicht-klassische Logik. Mentis Verlag, Paderborn 2008, 320 S. Wolfgang Rautenberg: Einführung in die Mathematische Logik. Vieweg+Teubner Verlag, 3. Aufl., Wiesbaden 2008, 249 S. Sven Rosenkranz: Einführung in die Logik. J. B. Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2006, 236 S . Niko Strobach: Einführung in die Logik. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2005, 159 S. Michael Wolff: Einführung in die Logik. Verlag C. H. Beck, München 2006, 195 S. Thomas Zoglauer: Einführung in die formale Logik für Philosophen, Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht/UTB, 4. Aufl., Göttingen 2010, 187 S.

Zusammenfassung Dominik Perler: Transformationen der Gefühle. Philosophische Emotionstheorien 1270–1670. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 2011, 533 S .

Zusammenfassung Julius Schälike: Spielräume und Spuren des Willens. Eine Theorie der Freiheit und der moralischen Verantwortung. Mentis Verlag, Paderborn 2010, 296 S.

Zusammenfassung Hans Bernard Schmid: Moralische Integrität. Kritik eines Konstrukts, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2011, 307 S.