The Virtue of Hope

What is hope? In the history of western philosophy to the present day, there is tremendous disagreement about the answer to this seemingly simple question. Contemporary philosophical literature on the subject is robust, complex, and full of interesting debates. Whether hope is good or bad, and whether we should focus not on hope, but on hopes, hoping, or hopefulness, as some contemporary philosophers argue, are contested questions.
This volume features eleven chapters by scholars from different disciplines, each providing a unique perspective on hope. It includes discussion and analysis of classical texts, Judeo-Christian traditions, non-religious contexts, epistemology, existentialism, Black oppression, Zen Buddhism, eschatology, theological anthropology, psychology and optimism, culture, education theory, and climate change. Hardly any stones are left unturned in this interdisciplinary collection of one of philosophy’s most vexing virtues.
The study of hope is ongoing in many fields. This volume will be useful to scholars in a variety of disciplines who wish to learn more about hope, and to contribute to the myriad discussions currently taking place.

Nancy E. Snow is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. She was co-director of The Self, Motivation and Virtue Project, a research initiative on the moral self, and the principal investigator of another research initiative, The Self, Virtue, and Public Life Project. She is the author of Virtue as Social Intelligence (Routledge, 2009), and Contemporary Virtue Ethics (Cambridge, 2020), and co-author of Understanding Virtue (Oxford, 2021). She has published over forty-five papers on virtue and ethics more broadly, and is the series editor of The Virtues, this fifteen-volume interdisciplinary series.