Hope and the Kantian Legacy: New Contributions to the History of Optimism

Hope is understood to be a significant part of human experience, including for motivating behaviour, promoting happiness, and justifying a conception of the self as having agency. Yet substantial gaps remain regarding the development of the concept of hope in the history of philosophy. This collection addresses this gap by reconstructing and analysing a variety of approaches to hope in late 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy.

In 1781, Kant's idea of a “rational hope” shifted the terms ...