I. Analysis of Hope.- 1. Hope Talk.- 2. Hope's Objectives.- 3. Hoping, Desiring, and being Satisfied.- 4. Hoping, Imagining, and Projecting.- 5. Hoping, Possibility, Desirability, and Belief.- 6. Hope as Feeling.- 7. Hope-In.- Towards two kinds of desire.- Objections.- 8. Hope, Society, and History.- II. Ultimate Hope and Fundamental Hope.- 9. Ultimate Hope and Fundamental Hope: Preliminary Characterization.- Ultimate hope.- Context of the fundamental.- Fundamental hope.- 10. Ernst Bloch's Full Hope: "Explosive, Total, and Incognito".- Utopian function.- Full hope: "explosive, total, incognito".- Explosive.- Total.- Incognito.- 11. Immanuel Kant and the Highest Good.- Hope for perpetual peace.- Hope for the highest good as the individual's deserved happiness.- Virtue.- Deserved happiness.- Hope for the ethical commonwealth and the kingdom of God.- Review.- 12. Gabriel Marcel: I Hope in Thee for Us.- Captivity, despair, desire, and hope.- Hope for salvation, hope for us.- Hoping's ontological import.- Social hope.- Hope in thee.- Reasons and hoping.- By way of definitions.- Contribution of notions of ultimate hope and fundamental hope.- Ultimate hope.- Fundamental hope.- Absolute hope.- 13. Ultimate Hope and Fundamental Hope: Concluding Position.- Types of ultimate hope qua objectives.- Some complex forms of hope's objectives.- Tension: modesty and transcendence.- Alienation.- Finitude and alienation.- Types of ultimate hope qua types of desiring.- Fundamental hope.- Sound ultimate hope: its formal characteristics.- Concluding position.- III. Ontologies, Implications, and Theism.- 14. Ontologies.- Two models.- The will-nature model.- The inter subjective model.- Ontological bearing of the two models.- Epistemological bearing of the two models.- Anthropological-societal-ethical bearing of the two models.- Convergencies and corollaries.- 15. Implications of Hope.- Implications of formally sound ultimate hope.- Trust implied by sound ultimate hope's desiring.- Summary.- Implications of fundamental hope.- Understandings of hope's trust.- Implications of hope's trust.- Absolute trust.- Integration and soundness.- Summary.- 16. Bloch's Atheism and Ontology: A Sketch.- 17. Kant and Belief in God.- Postulation of adequate causality.- Belief in adequate causality.- Specification of the postulate as God.- Faith as trust.- Nature and history.- 18. Marcel and Absolute Thou.- Full hope, implication, and thou.- Absolute hope.- Implication, ontology, and indication.- 19. Conclusion.- Is the future open?.- Is the future open for me?.- What sort of a future is believed open?.- The kingdom of God - without God?.- What to look for, and how: images of God.- Hope: organ of apprehension?.- 20. Epilogue on some Religious and Theological Thought.- Imagining and conceiving what is hoped for: eschatology.- Theology of hope and liberation theology.- Healing, body, and time: John Macquarrie.- Hope's trust as cognitive: Küng, Evans, Buber.- Selected Bibliography.

Few reference works in philosophy have articles on hope. Few also are systematic or large-scale philosophical studies of hope. Hope is admitted to be important in people's lives, but as a topic for study, hope has largely been left to psychologists and theologians. For the most part philosophers treat hope en passant. My aim is to outline a general theory of hope, to explore its structure, forms, goals, reasonableness, and implications, and to trace the implications of such a theory for atheism or theism. What has been written is quite disparate. Some see hope in an individualistic, often existential, way, and some in a social and political way. Hope is proposed by some as essentially atheistic, and by others as incomprehensible outside of one or another kind of theism. Is it possible to think consistently and at the same time comprehensively about the phenomenon of human hoping? Or is it several phenomena? How could there be such diverse understandings of so central a human experience? On what rational basis could people differ over whether hope is linked to God? What I offer here is a systematic analysis, but one worked out in dialogue with Ernst Bloch, Immanuel Kant, and Gabriel Marcel. Ernst Bloch of course was a Marxist and officially an atheist, Gabriel Marcel a Christian theist, and Immanuel Kant was a theist, but not in a conventional way.