Speaker Series: Jack Kwong, professor of philosophy and religion, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC

“The Nature of Despair”

The Problem of Despair has received much attention in the philosophy of hope. According to this problem, the Standard Account of hope, which claims that hoping for an outcome is a matter of desiring it and believing that its obtainment is possible, is flawed because its definition fails to rule out instances of despair: People who despair, the objection runs, also desire outcomes that they believe are obtainable. While there has been significant debate in the literature over how to define hope so as to distinguish it from despair, surprisingly little work by comparison has been done to shed light on the nature of despair. This paper will attempt to remedy this neglect. In particular, I will argue that the problem of despair rests on a confusion about the nature of hope and of despair. Once this confusion is clarified, we will see that the problem has an easy and elegant solution. We will also end up with a rather robust account of despair, which I argue satisfies a recently proposed list of desiderata of an adequate account of despair. I conclude by discussing some surprising implications of this account of despair.