Recently, there has been a great deal of work done on the philosophy of hope. Analytic philosophers have worked to clarify what hope is and what it is good for. The philosophy of hope, both in its recent and historical incarnations, tends to imply that it can produce hope. In this article, I develop an alternative to the philosophy of hope. Through a reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein, I argue that to theorize hope is to lose hope, that no general account of hope is possible or even desirable. I show that although Wittgenstein might seem to offer a theory of hope, he actually shows us how to dislodge our philosophical theories about hope. I suggest that it is this dissolution of our theories that might itself be a source of hope.
Linden Smith (Fri,) studied this question.