Hopeful Suspension (Levy Wang)

Despite its historical significance, hope has not been widely discussed in contemporary philosophy. It is especially under-discussed in theoretical and practical rationality despite its ability to influence our beliefs and actions. The current paper aims to situate hope in the contemporary discussion of rationality and epistemology. 

The paper has two theses: First, there are requirements of rationality governing hope, knowledge, beliefs, reasons, and intentions. The second thesis is that the cognitive dimension of hope is a form of suspension: to hope p is partly to suspend judgment on whether p. Consequently, hope inherits norms governing suspension, which give rise to requirements of

rationality governing hope.

The two theses are significant for two reasons. First, the requirements place hope in the traditional literature on structural rationality, which mainly focuses on belief, knowledge, intentions, and actions. It is important to recognize these states are not the only ones we care about in practical and epistemic rationality. After all, our mental life is far richer than mere beliefs, knowledge, intentions, and actions. I hope this paper serves as a starting point for including affective states in traditional discussions of rationality.

Second, the requirements and hopeful suspension show hope is not some epiphenomenal feeling with no cognitive structure. Rather, hopeful suspension, by relating hope to a familiar doxastic state, helps us further understand the nature of hope. It can also shed light on other questions around hope, such as the substantive rationality and fittingness of hope.

On Improvising a Life (Steven Diggin)

Sartre gave us the plausible idea that a human life can (or perhaps must) be meaningfully unified by the intentional performance of a self-constituting fundamental project over the course of one’s existence. I argue that the nature of one’s fundamental project cannot be determined by an ‘original choice’, as Sartre claims. Later theorists (notably, MacIntyre) argued that human lives are instead unified by narration or narratability. I argue that narratives, by themselves, cannot do the work that we want them to do here. Instead, I propose a new model for how a human life can be unified into a meaningful whole, where our fundamental project is determined improvisationally. This involves adopting a holistic plan sometime in the course of one’s life, where this is a plan about how what one has done fits together with what one will do in such a way as to form a meaningful and valuable whole.

Ritual as a Mode of Dwelling in Time (Jing Hwan Khoo)

From journaling, daily coffee, and self-care routines to weddings and coronations, rituals clearly constitute a part of the good life. And yet, analytic philosophers have not even begun to explain why. The question of ritual is by no means idle, for what is at stake is at least two opposing forms of modern anxieties about the practice. The first is an anxiety about the loss of rituals, premised on an optimistic view of ritual as being somehow crucial to communal life. The second is an anxiety about the prevalence of ritual in social life, premised on a critical view that ritual is somehow irrational or oppressive. On my view, the communitarian and critical views of ritual, while not incorrect, presuppose a more fundamental conception of ritual—which this paper argues in favor of—as a mode of self-construction. It is commonly said of ritual that it is a home in time. I argue that this metaphor gets at something real about rituals. The home is both a stable physical and social entity and a space to make contact with the people and things that matter to us. In a parallel manner, ritual is a stable practice in which we engage with what matters. In this way, there is a surprising analogy between the practical wisdom of building and inhabiting a home and the practical wisdom of ritualization. Ritual is a shelter to the existential anxieties that come with the otherwise risky business of doing self-construction by way of telic projects.