Hope

22 Nov, 2018 120 Epistemology

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the philosophy of hope. To the ancient Greeks, hope was closer to self-deception, one of the evils left in Pandora’s box or jar, in Hesiod’s story. In Christian tradition, hope became one of the theological virtues, the desire for divine union and the expectation of receiving it, an action of the will rather than the intellect. To Kant, ‘what may I hope’ was one of the three basic questions which human reason asks, while Nietzsche echoed Hesiod, arguing that leaving hope in the box was a deception by the gods, reflecting human inability to face the demands of existence. Yet even those critical of hope, like Camus, conceded that life was nearly impossible without it.

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Guests

  • Beatrice Han-Pile 4 episodes
    Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex
  • Robert Stern 2 episodes
    Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield
  • Judith Wolfe No other episodes
    Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of St Andrews

Reading list

  • Summa Theologia
    Thomas Aquinas (Ave Maria Press, 2000) Google Books →
  • The Principle of Hope
    Ernst Bloch (trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight) (Blackwell, 1986) Google Books →
  • Hope Without Optimism
    Terry Eagleton (Yale University Press, 2015) Google Books →
  • Critique of Pure Reason
    Immanuel Kant (eds. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood) (Cambridge University Press, 1999) Google Books →
  • Kant: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And Other Writings
    Immanuel Kant (trans. Allen Wood) (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
  • Works of Love
    Soren Kierkegaard (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009) Google Books →
  • Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Devastation
    Jonathan Lear (Harvard University Press, 2006)
  • Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope,
    Gabriel Marcel (St Augustine's Press, 2010) Google Books →
  • Hope in a Democratic Age
    Alan Mittleman (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books →
  • Theology of Hope
    Jurgen Moltmann (SCM Press, 2010) Google Books →
  • Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol
    Erwin Panofsky (Princeton University Press, 1956) Google Books →
  • Philosophy and Social Hope
    Richard Rorty (Penguin, 1999) Google Books →
  • Confessions
    Saint Augustine (Penguin, 2002) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m00017vl

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00017vl

Auto-category: 128 (Humankind)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello, according to the poet Hesiod, hope was all that remained in Pandora's jar once all the evils inside it escaped and spread across the world.