Faith as Imagination and the Despair Problem

According to non-doxasticism, religious faith can be in an important sense belief-less. However, such faith becomes vulnerable to the despair-problem known from the literature on hope. I suggest that the problem can be overcome by adopting J. L. Schellenberg’s imagination-based account of non-doxastic faith. In developing this idea, I draw on the account of imagination offered by Amy Kind and an understanding of despair suggested by Cheshire Calhoun. The core of my proposal is that faith excludes despair if both attitudes are conceived of in terms of holding a phenomenological picture of the world in one’s imagination.