Aristotle tries to solve the riddle of future-directedness and luck-awareness by offering an account of what he calls ‘good hope’ or hoping-well. I concede that hope does not hold Aristotle’s attention for long. However, his allusions to hope (in the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics, and the Rhetoric) allow us to articulate a quite detailed, illuminating, and rich phenomenology of hope that will prove to be decisive when inquiring into how hopefulness belongs to the core of practical life, thereby making (...) an important contribution to contemporary discussions of hope. (shrink)

This chapter discusses metaphors for elpis in early Greek poetry. Metaphor can be a crucial element in the formation and extension of emotion concepts and gives an unsurpassed sense of a culture’s phenomenology of emotion; the chapter aims to establish how far elpis metaphors resemble those of other, more prototypical emotion concepts. A brief discussion of the semantics of elpis in Homer and other early Greek poetic sources is followed by a review of the main categories of (...) metaphors for elpis. It is clear that elpis can, but need not, mean “hope”; and it is equally clear that elpis need not be thought of in metaphorical terms. Elpis metaphors, however, cluster very strongly around those applications that can be interpreted in terms of English “hope.” They characterize elpis as an emotion; but they rarely make it as violent, disruptive, or irruptive an experience as many other emotions are. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to illustrate the significance of hope (elpis, elpizein) in Plato’s Philebus and to indicate topics under this heading that invite further investigation. Even though there is some scholarship treating the issue of hope in the Philebus, there is no study solely devoted to this topic. By providing such a study I intend to fill this lacuna and to show that examining this topic is valuable because it develops our understanding of the good life. (...) In this essay I maintain that the Philebus defines hope as (1) a pleasure of the soul that (2) anticipates pleasure as certain, (3) may be true or false, (4) may be pure or impure, and (5) involves memory. I proceed chronologically through the Philebus’s discussions of hope and make every effort to treat each of the aforementioned components of the definition separately. In so doing I explain why certain topics, such as the relationship between pure intellectual hope and philosophical activity, invite further investigation. (shrink)

Artykuł jest próbą odtworzenia myślenia Greków o fenomenie nadziei. Stwierdzona zostaje wielopoziomowa jej ambiwalencja. Najpierw jako spodziewanie się albo czegoś dobrego, albo czegoś złego. Następnie jako nadzieja negatywna bądź pozytywna. Na koniec jako nadzieja moralnie dobra bądź zła w zależności od etycznej oceny jej przedmiotu. Stwierdzona zostaje też korelacja strachu i nadziei. Postawiony zostaje problem odniesienia nadziei do czasu. W tym kontekście są rozważane są poglądy Hezjoda, Tukidydesa, Platona, Arystotelesa i stoików.

This chapter examines a range of ancient Greek and Roman views regarding hope, developing themes drawn from philosophical sources—including Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoic and Epicurean schools—and discussing approaches and applications in the narratives of Thucydides and in ancient Greek medicine. Selected references to Greek and Roman literature and cultural practices are also included. Together, these ancient sources reveal complex human attitudes about the future, and the chapter considers various criteria used to make judgments about the value of hope. Themes (...) include the relationships of hope to fear and courage, rationality and memory, emotion and pleasure, and human agency and well-being. Throughout, connections are made with current philosophical literature on hope, in the belief that familiarity with the variety and nuance of ancient attitudes can promote a deeper understanding of our own notions of hope. (shrink)

Although the free will debate of contemporary analytic philosophy lacks almost any kind of historical perspective, some scholars have pointed out a striking similarity between Stoic approaches to free will and Frankfurt’s well-known hierarchical theory. However, the scholarly agreement is only apparent because they disagree about the kind of similarity between the Stoic and the Frankfurtian theories. The main thesis of my paper is that so far, commentators have missed the crucial difference between the Stoics’ approach to free will and (...) Frankfurt’s, a difference that makes the former the superior approach. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of authors (e.g., Rae Langton, Mary K. McGowan, and Ishani Maitra) have tried to understand sexist and racist hate speech using John Austin’s speech act theory. These authors agree that acts of hate speech subordinate in two senses: on the one hand, they cause subordination insofar as they have subordinating causal consequences. On the other hand, they also constitute subordination insofar as the speech acts themselves, i.e. independently of their causal consequences, subordinate in some sense. (...) However, there is disagreement about how exactly subordination in this latter sense is to be understood. My proposal builds on and refines that of Rebecca Kukla. Following Kukla, I assume that central cases of hate speech are, regarding the type of speech act, interpellations or vocatives, and that slurs are interpellations with a certain kind of content. An interpellation is a speech act of hailing another person, using a social role or identity she has, such as “Hi, Eli!” or “Officer, …”. Slurs are speech acts of the same type, however, with a derogated, subordinated social role as their content. I adopt Kukla’s general theory of speech acts to analyze interpellations. According to this theory, speech acts strive to change the normative commitments and entitlements of others. I argue that in the case of interpellations, this normative output is best understood as a call on the addressee to activate an identity or a social role she already has, according to the ideology, but which she may not be actively playing at the moment. I argue that no special authority is required to make such a call. I then propose an explanation of the sense in which slurs constitute subordination. Applying the analysis of interpellations, we can see that slurs call upon the addressee to actively play a derogated social role she has according to the ideology. In this sense, slurs can be said to cue the ideology, to use Swanson’s suggestive phrase. (shrink)

In feminist philosophy, there is a silent but consistent recurrence of criticisms regarding the mainstream, “liberal” defense of the right to abortion, most prominently exemplified by Judith Jarvis Thomson’s seminal paper “A Defense of Abortion”. In this paper, I explore the feminist proposals of Alison M. Jaggar (1975) and Sally Markowitz (1990) and examine, in light of these, the prospects of a particularly feminist ethics of abortion. I argue that although feminist theorists are right to say that defenses based on (...) bodily autonomy set the wrong agenda for public discourse, thus contributing to a misleading and uninformed debate, Thomsonian arguments still have considerable advantages, both in philosophy and in the public discourse. In particular, while Thomsonian accounts can successfully sidestep the conflict between the mother’s and the fetus’s rights, currently available feminist proposals can meaningfully transform but cannot eliminate this problem. (shrink)