JSP 20-2 fm.indd

We must not worry how few we are and fall from each other More than language can express Hope for the artist in America & etc —Susan Howe, " Articulation of Sound Forms in Time " Meliorism, or philosophical hopefulness, has long been acknowledged to be a genuine infl uence on pragmatist philosophy. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in this idea as an increasing number of books and articles are calling attention to the role that hope plays in the pragmatist way of thinking. 1 But despite this increase of interest in pragmatist meliorism and the near universal acknowledgment that meliorism is somehow central to pragmatism, it remains to be spelled out exactly how meliorism contributes to pragmatism. I here undertake the project of explicating the philosophical signifi cance of pragmatist meliorism. I understand pragmatism, and fi nd it at its best, as a philosophical way of taking hope seriously. Pragmatism develops the philosophical resources of hope. One implication is that traditional philosophical categories look different when seen pragmatically, where they are infl ected with, and interpreted through, hopeful-ness. It is thus that traditional philosophical concepts—such as truth—are widely understood to be severely reconstructed by pragmatism. Yet the motivations for, and philosophical signifi cance of, these reconstructions remain obscure so long as the meliorism at the heart of pragmatism is left unexplained. The purpose of this article is to show both that pragmatism is plausibly understood as hopeful philosophy and that this philosophical call to hopefulness is a good successor to the long-standing quests for certainty that have dominated philosophy throughout modernity.