How should we act if it feels like our culture is collapsing or our civilization is ending? At the end of his life, the great Chief of the Crow Nation, Plenty Coups, said: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” In Radical Hope, philosopher Jonathan Lear examines the potential meaning of this statement and Plenty Coups’s life as a whole. What does it mean to live a life of great activity and yet claim that “nothing happened”? What does it mean to hope at the end of the world?

This reading group will be led by Dr. Nathaniel Peters (Morningside) over lunch and is open to undergraduates, graduate students, and recent graduates. In this first session we will discuss chapter 1: After This, Nothing Happened.