Nicht aus der Schweiz? Besuchen Sie lehmanns.de
Hopeful Pessimism - Mara van der Lugt

Hopeful Pessimism

Buch | Hardcover
280 Seiten
2025
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-0-691-26560-5 (ISBN)
CHF 34,90 inkl. MwSt
  • Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Januar 2025)
  • Portofrei ab CHF 40
  • Auch auf Rechnung
  • Artikel merken
Why “hopeful pessimism” is not a contradiction in terms but a powerful source of moral and political commitment

The climate debate is rife with calls for optimism. While temperatures rise and disasters intensify, we are asked to maintain optimism and hope, as if the real threat is pessimism and despair. In this erudite and engaging book, Mara van der Lugt argues that this is a mistake: crude optimism can no longer be a virtue in a breaking world, and may well prove to be our besetting vice. In an age of climate change and ecological devastation, the virtue we need is hopeful pessimism.

Drawing on thinkers that range from J.R.R.Tolkien and Mary Shelley to Albert Camus and Jonathan Lear, van der Lugt invites us to rethink what we thought we knew about optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, activism and grief. She shows that pessimism is closely linked to a tradition of moral and political activism, and offers a different way to think about pessimism: not as synonymous with despair but as compatible with hope. Gently yet fiercely, van der Lugt argues that what we need to avoid is not pessimism but fatalism or self-serving resignation. Pessimism does not imply the loss of courage or the lack of a desire to strive for a better world; on the contrary, these are the very gifts that pessimism can bestow.

What Hopeful Pessimism asks instead is that we strive for change without certainties, without expecting anything from our efforts other than the knowledge that we have done what we are called upon to do as moral agents in a time of change.

Mara van der Lugt is lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering, Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child? (both Princeton), and Bayle, Jurieu, and the “Dictionnaire Historique et Critique.”

Erscheint lt. Verlag 21.1.2025
Zusatzinfo 2 color + 6 b/w illus.
Verlagsort New Jersey
Sprache englisch
Maße 140 x 216 mm
Themenwelt Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ethik
ISBN-10 0-691-26560-7 / 0691265607
ISBN-13 978-0-691-26560-5 / 9780691265605
Zustand Neuware
Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR)
Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt?
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich

von Christopher Panza; Adam Potthast

Buch | Softcover (2023)
Wiley-VCH (Verlag)
CHF 27,95
die Biografie

von Thomas Meyer

Buch | Hardcover (2023)
Piper (Verlag)
CHF 39,90