Although Immanuel Kant is best known for his work on epistemology and ethics, he is arguably the first philosopher to declare the central importance of a philosophy of hope. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he claims there are three fundamental questions that philosophy should address:
- What can I know? (Epistemology)
- What should I do? (Ethics)
- For what may I hope? (?)
Despite its fundamental importance, Kant’s third question went largely unheeded for over a century. Even today, the philosophy of hope is a minor topic in philosophy at best, especially when compared to epistemology and ethics. This is exemplified by the topic’s lack of its own label.
But hope becomes a central concern for a group of primarily American philosophers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries aligned under the banner of pragmatism.
According to Louis Menard’s definitive history of the founding of pragmatism, The Metaphysical Club (2001), this focus on the philosophy of hope known as meliorism is sparked by three seismic events that upend the traditional religious answers to “For what may we hope?” These events are the US Civil War, Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, and the development of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Classical pragmatists respond to these events in a few different ways. While Chauncey Wright accepts a world of boundless change, he offers little hope or certainty beyond the constants of what he calls “cosmic weather.” Charles Sanders Peirce embraces a reality without foundations while believing humanity will progress toward a gradually perfecting and salvific existence.
But it’s in William James’ meliorism that we encounter a naturalized theism that accepts the tragic nature of a constantly changing reality while providing hope for a world in which eternally perfect unity is not guaranteed but, perhaps, remains possible.
This latter meliorism is what animates the hope of those with a pragmatist temperament similar to William James...
https://erraticus.co/2022/10/27/what-can-pragmatists-hope-for-in-a-boundless-world/
