Accueil
"Hope, we learn at a very young age, is always good to have. Fortunately, too, there is apparently always hope to find. If we focus hard enough, we are supposed to be able to sustain hope—even when the world around us is frightening, dark, and unjust. Losing hope, or being suspected of losing hope, is often met with condemnation. “You shouldn’t get bogged down in negative thinking like that. Stay hopeful!” we often hear from our family, friends, and the media. But what is this thing “hope” that ends up in so many sayings, news headlines, and inspirational quotes ? And why is hope so valuable that we are so often urged to preserve and protect it ?
This book is about the role of hope in human life, particularly in the lives we lead as moral, social, and political beings. It is about the nature and value of hope in the real world in which we live, a non-ideal world that includes suffering, disadvantage, luck, violence, harm, and loss. I want to understand what human agents hope for in this world, whether hope is valuable to us as we navigate our vulnerabilities and the hardships of life, and the relationship between hope and other elements of our psychologies including expectation, trust, anger, and faith. This project is, ultimately, an inquiry in moral psychology: a field concerned with how “we function as moral agents” and the roles of cognition, perception, and emotion in moral agency." (p.1)
"As Margaret Urban Walker (2004) explains, philosophical moral psychology is part of ethics. It is a descriptive and normative project that “discovers our real possibilities and limits, and assesses morally our adequacy for living our lives” (xiii). Although it is not itself empirical, philosophical moral psychology “can and should take a searching and critical view of scientific claims”." (note 1 p.1)
-Katie Stockdale, Hope Under Oppression, Oxford University Press, 2021, 213 pages.
