Speaker Series: Cheshire Calhoun (Arizona State)

Cheshire Calhoun is Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University, chair of the American Philosophical Association’s board of officers, and Research Professor at the University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. Her work stretches across the philosophical subdisciplines of normative ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of emotion, feminist philosophy, and gay and lesbian philosophy. She is the author of Feminism, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet (OUP), the editor of Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers (OUP), and the co-editor with Robert C. Solomon of What is an Emotion: Classic Readings in Philosophical Psychology. Most recently, she published a collection of previously published essays titled Moral Aims: Essays on the Importance of Getting it Right and Practicing Morality with Others (OUP).

Her published essays include articles on forgiveness, integrity, shame, common decency, commitment, and civility in journals including Ethics, Hypatia, Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Political Philosophy and Philosophy and Public Affairs. She is currently working on a book titled Meaningful Living. She is series editor for Oxford University Press’s Studies in Feminist Philosophy and an associate editor for the journal Ethics. In addition to teaching at Arizona State University, she has taught at the College of Charleston, Colby College, University of Louisville, and Princeton University.

“Motivating Hope”

Hope is often thought to play an important motivational role in sustaining practical pursuits under difficult conditions where the odds of success are quite low and/or when the pursuit encounters significant obstacles and set backs. Hope is thus important to our agency. The main goal of the paper is to get a clearer fix on (a) exactly what the motivational problem is in these kinds of cases, and (b) how hope addresses that motivational problem. I argue that the most obvious account of what the motivational problem is—viz. our own subjective probability assessment that success is (highly) unlikely—cannot be the correct account, in part because locating the motivational problem there yields unattractive accounts of how hope works to sustain practical pursuits. I suggest an alternative picture of what the motivational problem is and how hope works to overcome that problem.