Hope

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s the one you’ve been hoping for. In episode 115 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss the meaning of hope, from casual travel plans, to electoral optimism, to theological liberation. They discuss how hope motivates action, and how its rosy tint might be paralyzing. They explore Kant’s ambitions for perpetual peace, and discuss the Marxian imperative to transform the world. They ask, is it rational to hope? How does hoping relate to desire and expectation? And should we hope for what seems realistic, or reach for impossible utopias? Plus, in the bonus, they discuss chivalry, the future, agency, tenure, burritos, and capitalist realism.

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed
Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
Joseph J. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Religion Within The Limits of Reason Alone, Perpetual Peace
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation
John Lysaker, Hope, Trust, and Forgiveness: Essays in Finitude
Adrienne Martin, How We Hope: A Moral Psychology
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
Anthony Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart
Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise
Katja Vogt, “Imagining Good Future States: Hope and Truth in Plato’s Philebus”

Support the show

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:16.3	The podcast that trades on your hope that philosophy is relevant for your life.
0:21.8	I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:29.0	And I'm David Pena Guzman. We sadly seem to live in a hopeless moment. Fascism is on the price globally. We are witnessing an ongoing genocide in Gaza. There is no sign of capitalism abating
0:35.5	anytime soon. And climate change brings us closer and closer to the prospect of our own extinction.
0:42.3	But at the same time, hope has been used a lot in political discourse lately.
0:46.7	I noticed that when the Democrats decided to make Kamala Harris the candidate over the summer,
0:51.5	Michelle Obama said at the DNC that Hope is making a comeback. Also, Tim Walts's
0:57.8	daughter, I couldn't help but note, is named hope, cute. I didn't know that, but it does seem like
1:05.0	a callback to Obama era liberalism since, after all, Obama's entire campaign strategy was based on hope, right?
1:12.8	And I do think that we see hope making a comeback on the left.
1:18.1	And I think it's important to distinguish that from the rhetoric that we see coming out of
1:22.8	the right, which sometimes uses hopeful-sounding language to ultimately convey an image of what is the opposite
1:31.8	of hope. And I'm here thinking about Trump's famous Make America Great Again slogan, which sounds
1:39.2	optimistic, but actually hinges on a decadent reading of American culture and American history.
1:47.1	Yeah, I think you're right that there's something deeply hopeless in the Make America Great Again slogan,
1:54.1	in spite of its ostensible optimism.
1:57.6	I think part of that for me comes from the fact that the very slogan is harkening back to some mythic past that never even existed, right?
2:06.1	It's Make America Great again. And one thing I couldn't help but notice in the first presidential debate between Harris and Trump was that Harris very frequently evoked a sense of we're not moving back, we're moving forward.
2:19.8	Like, I want to turn the page on Trump's tired rhetoric.
2:22.8	So that also made clear to me that she is trading on the American public's idea that Trump is pulling us back,
2:32.0	whereas she wants to move us into some more hopeful future.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D., and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D. and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.