Online research in philosophy

At first glance, it may appear that those who believe in divine providence have a happier lot and are much less prone to despair than those who reject god and divine providence altogether. That alone may seem to give us good reason to prefer belief to non-belief. I shall argue in this essay that there is almost nothing to be said for either the view that belief in providence provides invincible armor against despair or for the view that the atheist who rejects providence need surrender to a paralyzing despair.

In this paper, I investigate the experience of hope by focusing on experiences that seem to rival hope, namely, disappointment, desperation, panic, hopelessness, and despair. I explore these issues phenomenologically by examining five kinds of experiences that counter hope (or in some instances, seem to do so): first, by noting the cases in which hope simply is not operative, then by treating the significance of both desperation and pessimism, next by examining the experience of hopelessness, and finally, by treating the experience of despair. Here despair is shown to constitute the most profound challenge to hope among these experiences and to be foundational for the others, even though it is disclosed ultimately as founded in hope.

CHAPTER I CONTEMPORARY DESPAIR AND ITS ANTIDOTE 1. Forebodings The prevalent mood of contemporary mankind is one of despair, for never before have the ...

The literature on Kierkegaard is often content to paraphrase. By contrast, Michael Theunissen articulates one of Kierkegaard's central ideas, his theory of despair, in a detailed and comprehensible manner and confronts it with alternatives. Understanding what Kierkegaard wrote on despair is vital not only because it illuminates his thought as a whole, but because his account of despair in The Sickness unto Death is the cornerstone of existentialism. Theunissen's book, published in German in 1993, is widely regarded as the best treatment of the subject in any language. Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair is also one of the few works on Kierkegaard that bridge the gap between the Continental and analytic traditions in philosophy. Theunissen argues that for Kierkegaard, the fundamental characteristic of despair is the desire of the self "not to be what it is." He sorts through the apparently chaotic text of The Sickness unto Death to explain what Kierkegaard meant by the "self," how and why individuals want to flee their selves, and how he believed they could reconnect with their selves. According to Theunissen, Kierkegaard thought that individuals in despair seek to deny their authentic selves to flee particular aspects of their character, their past, or the world, or in order to deny their "mission." In addition to articulating and evaluating Kierkegaard's concept of despair, Theunissen relates Kierkegaard's ideas to those of Heidegger, Sartre, and other twentieth-century philosophers.

This paper is a study of Kierkegaard’s concept of despair. The Danish etymology of fortvivleslse is examined in order to argue that, for Kierkegaard, despair is not simply a feeling, but is more fundamentally a willed misrelation in the self.

: The category of despair plays a central role in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous corpus, but its meaning is controversial. This paper offers an interpretation of its use in Either/Or (in particular, in the claim the aesthetic life is despair and the ethical life freedom from despair). After examining and rejecting two recent alternatives, I argue that despair is the conscious or unconscious assumption of a passive or fatalistic attitude toward one's existence, which attitude is informed by a misconstrual of the nature of human agency.