The pervasiveness of domestic employment in the South African context gives rise to the question as to why women not only enter into, but remain in, such an undervalued work situation, and whether they are ultimately able to exit this sector. Contextualising the sectoral engagement of domestic workers as a transitional work-life cycle characterised by impoverishment, limited alternatives, acceptance of the work context, and future directedness, with individual transition through these phases determined by a unique set (...) of circumstances, female domestic workers’ lived experience of their work-life cycle was explored within the framework of an interpretivist research design. Non-probability respondent-driven self-sampling was employed to select 20 participants, most of whom were representative of families with a long history of sectoral involvement, particularly along the female line. Dense, non-numerical data was generated through in-depth interviewing. Inductive data explication was conducted with the aid of MAXQDA. The findings confirmed the existence of an institutionalised culture of engagement within the sector perpetuated from one generation to the next. Hardship and an urgent need for survival leave many with little option but to enter and remain within the sector. Despite negative societal perceptions of the sector, those within it take pride in their work and view their engagement as an enabling tool to better their future prospects and those of their families. Attempts to exit the sector are unsuccessful due, in part, to a limited formal education and skills repertoire. Domestic workers are thus entrapped within a never-ending cycle of sectoral engagement, with the possibility of exiting the sector remaining merely a dream for many. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future Is Political and TransdisciplinaryAwais Aftab (bio)Philosophy, psychiatry, & psychology (PPP) is a transdisciplinary oasis, one of the few journals in mental health care that facilitate a meaningful dialogue between philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists, and scholars from related disciplines. The fact that PPP successfully provides such a space is of no small importance, especially from my perspective as a psychiatrist. The multidisciplinary nature of the undertaking has been (...) a central aspect of the identity of the journal from the very beginning. PPP has maintained this transdisciplinary inclusive spirit over the years, and its editorial and advisory boards remain richly representative, but the challenge of ensuring continued participation of clinicians is not insubstantial. After all, the point is not token participation, but a robust and transformative interdisciplinary engagement. Clinicians have much to contribute to philosophical debates, however, such capacity for dialogue requires sustained cultivation (Aftab & Waterman, 2021), and forces in medical education have led to a situation where comparatively fewer psychiatrists have the interest or the ability to engage in such rigorous dialogue with philosophers. Philosophy of mental health has grown and specialized exponentially since the mid-90s. Keeping up with this literature is difficult even for philosophers, it is no small feat for full-time clinicians.This means that PPP and its affiliate organizations have a responsibility to take a more active role in supporting educational initiatives to ensure that future generations of psychiatric clinicians are able to contribute to philosophical debates, and that philosophy of psychiatry does not become divorced from clinical and practical concerns. My advice to clinicians based on my experience would be two-fold: first, it is essential to acquire a basic familiarity with the philosophy of psychiatry literature. Aftab and Waterman (2021) offer a sample list of reading recommendations. At the time of this writing, the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry is also undertaking efforts to develop curricula aimed at clinicians. Second, it is important to find ways to interact with others in the philosophy of psychiatry community. Formal avenues to do so include the annual meetings of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry and the Philosophy Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, among others. There are also various online communities active on social media that many find helpful.In recent years, we have seen an unprecedented enthusiasm and support for inclusion of lived experience in mental health care. This is a welcome and much needed development, but we are only just beginning to scratch the surface of [End Page 5] how to philosophically navigate this inclusion. Frameworks such as standpoint epistemology and epistemic justice offer us starting points (Knox, 2022), but much remains to be worked out (Aftab, 2022). There are notable philosophical challenges, such as ascertaining the limits of lived experience, and the biases and errors to which it is vulnerable; the application of scientific method and philosophical criticism to lived experience; methods to resolve disagreements when different forms of lived experience contradict each other; handling discrepancies between knowledge from lived experience and knowledge from other sources be handled; and analyzing the intersection of politics of lived experience with other differentials of power. I anticipate that these topics will be of central importance to the field and to the journal in the coming years.It is also vital that philosophy of psychiatry engage with the sociopolitical dimensions of madness (Kalathil & Jones, 2016). The failure of philosophy to do so in a meaningful way has already been articulated powerfully by commentators such as Nev Jones (2022). An important aspect of acknowledging philosophy's failures in this regard comes from the notion of "elite capture," recently popularized by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022). It refers to how progressive philosophical ideas such as standpoint epistemology are co-opted by the "elite" to serve their own ends. Discussions on social media have already begun to point out that concepts in philosophy of psychiatry such as "epistemic injustice" show signs of elite capture by the psychiatric establishment, resulting in token participation but no systemic changes. Philosophy of psychiatry needs to tackle its own vulnerability to co-option. This will require creative forms of philosophizing and engagement with... (shrink)

It is debated among open theists whether propositions about the contingent future should be regarded as straightforwardly true or false, as all false without exception, or as lacking truth-values. This article discusses some recent work on this topic and proposes a solution different than the one I have previously endorsed.

Abstract:This essay explores ways that looming climate change will affect how we think about future winters in New England. By all accounts, by the end of the twenty-first century the depth of the region's winter snow and cold will be much reduced from their historical averages. Drawing upon personal reflection, scientific data, and close readings of iconic New England authors, the essay examines potential future conceptions of the region's winters. I am particularly interested in how the expected warmer (...) winters will demand rereading literary works by iconic figures such as Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Robert Frost. The essay begins with an examination of the role nostalgia has played in popular images of New England winters and argues for a critically informed version of nostalgia that will enable readers to mourn for what they might lose in the future. The concluding section examines the folklore behind the January Thaw. Climate change, I argue, will usher in a period of an ongoing New England thaw to which our poetry and natural history writing will have to adapt. (shrink)

What steps are needed to make life better and more convivial? The Second Convivialist Manifesto has presented a short diagnosis of the current crises and sketches of a possible and desirable future. It has been a necessary work of theoretical synthesis, but preserving a viable world also requires passion. It is thus urgent to show what people would gain from a shift to a post-neoliberal and post-growth convivialist future. This volume includes a theoretical debate on convivialism which (...) reflects dystopias and shows the multiple and major obstacles that convivialism will have to face. Mainly, however, the contributors to this volume create sketches of a convivial future and collect accounts of another future world which is attractive for as many as possible. (shrink)

PurposeTo present a generic empowerment ecology framework to guide the operation of Future Centers and to empower Future Center visitors to respond to the challenges facing them and develop and implement innovative solutions.Design/methodology/approachAn in‐depth case study was conducted in Be'er Sheva PISGA Future Center in the educational sector in Israel. Visits to a further 20 Future Centers around the world and a literature review helped to generalize the key findings and develop and validate the framework further.FindingsAlthough (...) empowerment is not always explicitly discussed in Future Centers, it is an important underlying philosophy. The framework developed in this research helps to ensure empowerment issues are systematically addressed and contains four perspectives: operating principles; resources; supporters and processes. These combine to form the empowerment ecology.Research limitations/implicationsThe empowerment ecology framework has been developed from observation predominantly in one Future Center. It should now be more fully tested and validated in other Future Centers.Practical implicationsThis paper provides a framework to help Future Center practitioners and other future oriented working environments stakeholders to explicitly address empowerment issues.Originality/valueThis paper provides a detailed description of the operation of a regionally focused Future Center in the educational sector. The paper presents a novel empowerment ecology framework for use in facilitated user‐centered collaborative working environments, such as Future Centers. (shrink)

What economic conditions are necessary for us to arrive at a post-work future, and what should a post-work future look like? This chapter argues that only through the democratization of core economic institutions can we properly experiment with post-work imaginaries. I argue, based on principles of participatory autonomy and relational equality, for the democratization of workplaces, finance and investment, and the knowledge commons. Given these necessary structural changes, the possibility of a post-work future (...) becomes a democratic choice by placing democratic decision-making power in the hands of those who are directly affected by workplace decisions, investment decisions, and the collective production of knowledge. Through this democratization process, the potential to reduce working hours, the possibility of building meaningful work, and the chance to decenter work as the mechanism for economic security and meaning-making, all become subject to democratic deliberation and decision-making. (shrink)

The ability to imagine hypothetical events in one’s personal future is thought to involve a number of constituent cognitive processes. We investigated the extent to which individual differences in working memory capacity contribute to facets of episodic future thought. College students completed simple and complex measures of working memory and were cued to recall autobiographical memories and imagine future autobiographical events consisting of varying levels of specificity . Consistent with previous findings, future thought was related to (...) analogous measures of autobiographical memory, likely reflecting overlapping cognitive factors supporting both past and future thought. Additionally, after controlling for autobiographical memory, residual working memory variance independently predicted future episodic specificity. We suggest that when imagining future events, working memory contributes to the construction of a single, coherent, future event depiction, but not to the retrieval or elaboration of event details. (shrink)

Public policy makers are calling for all university students to learn entrepreneurial competencies to prepare them to be productive citizens in an unpredictable future. Far more than simply starting up businesses, entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as a student-centric pedagogical technique (teaching through entrepreneurship) for helping students learn desperately needed foundational skills and attitudes such as curiosity, creativity, opportunity spotting, grit, resilience, proactivity, adaptability, empathy, self-efficacy, motivation, and tolerance for uncertainty and risk. This article describes generational trends that make this (...) education increasingly important and provides a Comprehensive Framework for Entrepreneurship Education (CFEE) to help implement best practices to achieve measurable Assurances of Learning (AoL) results at the institutional, degree program, and individual course levels. (shrink)

We’re solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.Utopian Studies, Futures, and Anticipatory Studies all focus, if in different ways, on the past, present, and futures. Utopian narratives anticipate, to cite Abensour, “what is different, the wish for the advent of a radical alterity here and now.”1 A tool that all disciplines use is storytelling—utopias as narratives by definition, Futures and Anticipatory Studies as critical and inquisitive tools. The Solarpunk Futures game taps into these disciplines by creatively exploring (...) still-possible or radically new worlds and societies.The Solarpunk Surf Club is an artists’ collective that has dedicated its work to the... (shrink)

Today, scientific research is seen as being largely dominated by the short-term, and by the constant need to gain legitimacy in the eyes of society. This text analyzes the existing literature on the concept of future and seeks to explore some of the main meanings it has for scientists. Based on interviews with researchers working on different projects in Portuguese research centers, the authors scrutinize some of the implications of the recurrent reference to the future in their research (...) agendas. Starting with a review of the literature on the relations between science, time, and future, they show that nowadays, scientists experience some difficulty when dealing with the long-term in science, mostly due to the pressure of the market on innovation. In view of their profiles and discourses, what must be stressed are the risks and challenges playing out in the conflict between the short and the long term in scientific research. (shrink)

It is no longer socially-acceptable to exhibit prejudice against ethnic minority people on grounds of their ethnicity, women on grounds of their gender, or working-class people on grounds of their class. The last bastions of discrimination are being overcome: such as prejudice against gay and lesbian people, and against disabled people. …Or, is there one more, crucial bastion of discrimination still strongly in place?

This book is the first to consider the outpouring of photo-based art created in China since the mid-1990s. Ambitious in scale and experimental in nature, these works reflect the turn toward media-based art that characterizes the next generation of younger Chinese artists. In addition to fostering a new understanding of contemporary Chinese art, Between Past and Future also provokes fresh and timely insights into the dynamics of Chinese culture in the 21st century.

Episodic memory is a major area of research in psychology. Initially viewed as a distinct store of information derived from experienced episodes, episodic memory is understood today as a form of mental "time travel" into the personal past. Recent research has revealed striking similarities between episodic memory - past-oriented mental time travel - and future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT). Seeing the Future: Theoretical Perspectives on Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel brings together leading contributors in both empirical and theoretical (...) disciplines to present the first interdisciplinary look at the human to imagine future scenarios. Chapters focus on the challenging conceptual and theoretical questions raised by FMTT, covering themes such as: varieties of future-oriented cognition; relationships between FMTT and episodic memory; subjective temporality in FMTT; the self in FMTT; and functional, evolutionary and comparative, developmental, and clinical perspectives on FMTT. With its focus on the conceptual issues at the heart of fast-developing research on FMTT, this edited volume will serve graduate students to senior scholars working on or interested in FMTT and related areas as a synthesis of current theoretical thinking and a source of questions for future FMTT research. (shrink)

The Conservative Manifesto has to be scoured for policies which might improve the lives of women as a sex. There is a section on animal welfare but nothing on the welfare of women. Little attention is paid to women's special problems either at work or as carers in the home. Yet much Conservative social policy depends on women as unpaid carers. (St-John Brooks, 1987).

This paper challenges the two aims of Michael Cholbi’s Rational Will View (RWV) which are to (1) offer an account of why paternalism is presumptively or pro tanto wrong and (2) relate the relative wrongness of paternalistic interventions to the rational powers that such interventions target (Sections 1 and 2). Some of a paternalizee’s choices harm their future selves in ways that would be wrong if they were done to others. I claim this challenges Cholbi’s second aim (2) because (...) the cases his account deems particularly wrong turn out to be not to be as wrongful as expected (Section 3). When this second aim is challenged, it has knock-on effects on the capacity of the RWV to discern which cases of paternalism are generally more wrongful than others, which undermines Cholbi’s first aim (1). I consider responses on behalf of Cholbi’s view but conclude that the account is insufficient on its own to vindicate its two aims (Section 4). Finally, I draw on recent work that adopts ideas from the practical reasoning literature to help determine paternalism’s wrongness (Section 5). I argue this helps Cholbi’s view withstand my objections, but we must remain skeptical of why interceding with rational powers is particularly wrong. (shrink)

This book explores the ways deconstruction addresses the issue of futurity (what Jacques Derrida calls the "to-come," [l'à-venir]). In order to achieve this, it focuses on three French expressions, venue, survenue, and voir-venir, each taken from the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Catherine Malabou. The idea behind this focus is to elude the issue of the one and only "to-come," as if this was a uniform and coherent entity or structure of experience, and to put forward instead (...) the possibility of a multiplicity of structures, each with a different intonation or pitch. Overall, this book makes an original contribution to the way deconstruction addresses the issue of futurity in the act of writing and translation. (shrink)

Apocalyptic fictions abound in contemporary culture, multiplying end-of-the-world fantasies of environmental collapse. Meanwhile, efforts toward global sustainability extrapolate from deep-past trends to predict and manage deep-future scenarios. These narratives converge in “eco-eschatologies,” which work as phantasms that construct our identities, our understanding of the world, and our sense of responsibility in the present. I critique ecoeschatology’s reliance on an interpretation of deep time that treats every temporal moment as interchangeable and projects the future as a chronological extension (...) of the past. This enacts what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “catastrophe of equivalence” by domesticating the future and obscuring the incommensurability of what resists substitution, conversion, or exchange. By contrast, the renewal of our responsibility toward the future, without apocalypse or apotheosis, requires an intuition of deep time that respects the singular anachronicity of the present and refuses the framing of existence against a background of annihilation. (shrink)

In this work, we treat the interpretation of tense in adjunct clauses in English and Russian (relative clauses, before/after/when-clauses) with a future matrix verb. The main findings of our paper are the following: 1. English has a simultaneous reading in Present adjuncts embedded under will. Russian Present adjuncts under budet or the synthetic perfective future can only have a deictic interpretation. This follows from our SOT parameter. 2. The syntax of Russian temporal adjunct clauses (do/posle togo kak…) (...) shows overt parts that had to be stipulated for English as covert in earlier papers. We present a neat and straightforward analysis of Russian temporal adjuncts. Contrary to Russian, English has Present under Future in before-clauses. It would be nice to relate this feature to the SOT parameter, but the construction seems to be an idiosyncrasy in the domain of subordinate tense. (shrink)

In browsing the contents of this book, my first thought was, “Well, sure, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Or, more cryptically to those in earshot, I uttered, “Well, sure, once you've made it through Ulysses everything can sound like Joyce.” But the joy and mental workout of All Future Plunges come not from nitpicking particular Joycean tropes or images but rather from considering Joyce as a cultural phenomenon for all who followed to engage with, immerse themselves (...) in, and speak to. His works anchor Vergara's five case studies in twentieth-and twenty-first-century Russian literature (Olesha, Nabokov, Bitov, Sokolov, and Shishkin). Joyce is deployed as a source of intertexts and influences and as the lens through which the Russian works are read. Vergara includes “points of contact” for each author to show knowledge of Joyce as well as the context in which Joyce was being read and discussed in Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet literary spheres. The framing work on intertextuality is significant in its own right and leads to compelling notions of how literary influences can be detected and discussed. Behind it all looms the bespectacled presence of Joyce (gazing out from the book's cover in pop-art primary colors) with his Oedipal tensions, modern epic style, bawdy language, and sonorous prose. But essentially what Vergara's book gives us is a glimpse of creative and smart people reading the work of another creative smart person.Vladimir Nabokov, an outspoken devotee of Joyce, had a peculiar rationale for not believing in heaven. He wrote that even if, in the afterlife, he found himself in paradise surrounded by all of his dead loved ones, he would not be able to shake the gnawing doubt that at any point these beloved phantoms might pull off their masks and reveal themselves to be demons. After reading All Future Plunges, a similar fear may grip the reader of modernist literature—that the many varied and nuanced references we find in these works may one day all prove to be simply myriad instantiations of Joyce in disguise. But even when that happens, I suppose we may still think to call it heaven. (shrink)

Libertarian justice arguably permits much that is harsh. It might plausibly be thought to generate only minimal obligations on the part of present people toward future generations. This turns out not to be so, at least on Nozick's version of libertarian justice, which is among the most thoroughly worked-out versions. Nozickian justice generates extensive obligations to future people. This provides an indirect argument for environmentalist policies such as resource conservation and wilderness preservation. The basis for these obligations is (...) Nozick's use of Locke's proviso, which is spelled out using the notion of the baseline. This paper explains how the extensive obligations are implied by the core ideas of Nozickian justice. There is also a discussion of some of the difficulties involved in understanding the notion of the baseline. However, these difficulties do not destroy the theoretical basis for obligations to future generations contained within Nozickian justice. Provided that libertarian justice involves some such device as Locke's proviso the enforcement of substantial environmentalist policies comes within the ambit of the libertarian minimal state. (shrink)

Antinatalist commentators recommend that humanity bring itself to a close, on the theory that pain and suffering override the value of any possible life. Other commentators do not require the voluntary extinction of human beings, but they defend that outcome if people were to choose against having children. Against such views, Richard Kraut has defended a general moral obligation to people the future with human beings until the workings of the universe render such efforts impossible. Kraut advances this view (...) on the grounds that we are obliged to exercise beneficence toward others and on the grounds that the goods available in human lives are morally compelling. This account ultimately succeeds in making no more than a prima facie defense of human perpetuation because considerations of beneficence could override – in some cases probably should – override any duty to perpetuate human beings. While the goods of human life may be distinctive, they cannot serve as reason-giving in regard to their own perpetuation. Ironically, the exercise of beneficence may authorize the extinction of human beings, if it becomes possible to enhance the goods available to human descendants in a way that moves them away from human nature as now given. The defense of a morally obligatory and strictly human future remains elusive, even as it becomes morally desirable to work against Fateful Catastrophes, those human-caused events that threaten to extinguish existing lives already good and enriching for their bearers. (shrink)

If the new and rapidly expanding discipline of neuroethics is to have a signii cant impact on patient care, the neuroscience clinicians must become familiar with the discipline, and be competent and comfortable in applying its cognitive base and principles to clinical decisionmaking. Familiarity with and practical experience in the application of basic biomedical knowledge and principles to clinical decision- making in the neurosciences becomes the essential foundation on which to begin to integrate neuroethics into medical education. The place where (...) the building of this foundation and the initial exposure to neuroethics must begin is in the residency program. This article describes the approach developed in the neurology residency education program at the University of Calgary to move toward achieving this goal. The key elements for the development and successful implementation of the program are outlined and a brief overview of the topics covered in the sessions is described. (shrink)

In _The Future without a Past,_ John Paul Russo goes beyond currently given reasons for the decline of the humanities and searches out its root causes in the technologization of everyday life. His main premise is that we are undergoing a transformation at the hands of technological imperatives such as rationalization, universalism, monism, and autonomy. The relation between ourselves and nature has altered to such a degree that we no longer live in a natural environment but in a technological (...) one. According to Russo, technological values have actually eroded human values instead of being “humanized” by them. What are the implications of this shift for the humanities, traditionally seen as safeguards of the human? Russo addresses this question by situating the decline of the humanities within the larger social and historical panorama. He explores how technological values have infiltrated the humanities to the point of weakening their instruction and undermining their force; at the same time, he shows how the humanities have confronted these trends and can continue to do so. Russo believes that if we understand how technology “works” and the nature of its powers, we will then know in which realms it must be accepted and where it should be resisted. Russo outlines the components of the technological system and examines their impact on the educational system. He also discusses the loss of historical memory, including the so-called loss of the self and the transformation of the library. He studies the parallels between technological and literary values in criticism and theory, concluding with an analysis of the fiction of Don DeLillo, one of the most prominent contemporary novelists. DeLillo’s exploration of technology in American life, matched by a powerful critique of it from a broadly humanistic and religious perspective, serves to summarize the themes of the book as a whole. _The Future without a Past_ will appeal to scholars and students of literary studies, intellectual and cultural history, philosophy, ethics, media studies, and American studies, as well as to general readers who are seeking deeper insights into today’s cultural debates. (shrink)

Many of the contemporary global challenges we face involve economics, and theologians serving the contemporary church cannot escape an engagement with economics. This paper explores the place of future hope in economics through an examination of Adam Smith’s treatment of the topic. It begins by outlining the eighteenth-century theological background of Smith’s work, including Stoicism, the Newtonian tradition of natural theology, and the Calvinism of the Scottish Enlightenment moderates. It argues that the future hope plays an important (...) (and neglected) role in Smith’s system. Future rewards and punishments are never invoked in a utilitarian manner; instead judgment and future life operate as a court of appeal where wrongs on this world are righted. The justice of this divine court of appeal is continuous with and reinforces the natural sense of justice we have in this present life. There can be no conflict between the two because, as Smith affirms, the same ‘great Director of nature’ is at work in both. For Smith the future state also operates as imaginative space where morality can be considered and renegotiated. Moving from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, some comments are offered on hope and contemporary economics, particularly how they might be brought together again to more fruitfully engage with the global challenges we face. (shrink)

Offers a sustained critique of Carl Schmitt's late work, especially of his geopolitical theory.

In a variety of ways, religiosity can help maintain or restore one's future capacity to act. Broadening the coping perspective for the psychology of religion (Pargament, 1997) seems to be an adequate theoretical framework for a differentiated analysis of who uses religiosity at what point, in what manner, and with which kind of outcomes in the process of coping with the future. We will introduce this approach and summarize the empirical results that are available up to now. Subsequently, (...) we will be occupied with religious cognitions about the future in a narrower sense: with the so-called millenarian or chiliastic ideas of some religious communities about the imminent end of this world. First, we will work out the specific criteria of such cognitions. Based on the approach of religious coping we will then examine whether millenarianism can be helpful in coping with the future. Our functional analysis proposes that central elements of chiliastic ideas serve to convince the believer that his life has meaning and purpose despite the obvious suffering and evil in the world. However, specific difficulties and risks are intertwined with chiliastic forms of coping with the future, namely: the derogation of this world, the problems arising from a prediction of explicit dates for the end of the world, and the connection between millenarianism and violence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Approaching History through the Future: Some Thoughts from a Feminist PragmatistErin McKennai was recently asked to write on the philosophy of history from a pragmatist perspective. My initial response was that this is not my area of specialization and that I didn’t really have much to say. Then I realized that it was interesting to think about how I view and use notions of history in my (...) class='Hi'>work as a feminist pragmatist. It turns out that in my own work, there is a theme of approaching/understanding history through the possibilities of the future. Rather than being confined by settled or fixed views of the present or the past, the present and past are better seen as possibilities for shaping new and different futures. This can be unsettling for many, as humans often like to justify practices and institutions with the idea that “it has to be this way” and/or “it has always been this way.” But unsettling this habit is important if we hope to approach conflict and disagreements in a productive manner that avoids dogmatism and division.Examining my own use of history in my varied philosophical work turned out to be interesting and instructive. It also revealed my reliance on theorists such as Jane Addams, Anna Julia Cooper, and John Dewey in my writing and my teaching. Usually, I work with implicit notions of history and its role in my philosophical writing. The one exception to that was in writing American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, co-authored with Scott L. Pratt. In that work, we explicitly took up a pragmatist approach to history rooted in the work of John Dewey. There, we wrote:For Peirce, James, and Dewey, philosophy worth the name began in response to experienced problems—situations marked by confusion, doubt, indeterminacy—and then returned to these problems, aiming to transform and reconstruct them in ways that allowed the inquirer to go forward, to encounter still more experience. Philosophy, then should be understood as an activity that arises from experience. Since [End Page 71] experience is framed by language, culture and history, philosophy is not a transcendental practice engaged with the really real and truly true.(McKenna and Pratt 3)In “Philosophy and Civilization,” Dewey noted that philosophy is closely tied to the histories of cultures. These ties are mutually transformative, as the philosophy produced is rooted in, and shaped by, the place and time just as it then transforms the place, time, and traditions that give rise to it.Dewey’s own philosophy of history guided our work in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present as we strove to offer a history of American philosophy that acknowledges its rootedness in particular times and places. In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Dewey noted that history is always in the making, when he wrote:The slightest reflection shows that the conceptual material employed in writing history is that of the period in which a history is written. There is no material available for leading principles and hypotheses save that of the historic present. As culture changes, the conceptions that are dominant in a culture change. Of necessity, new standpoints for viewing, appraising and ordering data arise. History is then rewritten. Material that had formerly been passed by, offers itself as data because the new conceptions propose new problems for solution requiring new factual material for statement and test.(LW 12:232–33)Dewey went on to argue that changes happening in the present put the past into a new perspective and bring to light new problems. This means that one’s understanding of the past is changed, and “we gain new instruments for estimating the force of present conditions as potentialities of the future” (LW 12:238). For this reason, in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, Pratt and I embedded the history of American philosophy in actual historical events that we thought could profitably provide context for the philosophy and could themselves be rethought from our present vantage point. We were guided by the standpoint that American philosophy is a tradition committed “to a dynamic, pluralistic world of experience in which knowledge is a... (shrink)

How can dystopian futures help provide the motivation to change the ways we operate day to day? _Futures Beyond Dystopia_ takes the view that the dominant trends in the world suggest a long-term decline into unliveable Dystopian futures. The human prospect is therefore very challenging, yet the perception of dangers and dysfunctions is the first step towards dealing with them. The motivation to avoid future dangers is matched by the human need to create plans and move forward. These twin (...) motivations can be very powerful and help to stimulate the fields of Futures Studies and Applied Foresight. This analysis of current Futures practice is split into six sections: * The Case Against Hegemony * Expanding and Deepening a Futures Frame * Futures Studies and the Integral Agenda * Social Learning through Applied Foresight * Strategies and Outlooks * The Dialectic of Foresight and Experience. This fascinating book will stimulate anyone involved in Futures work around the world and will challenge practitioners and others to re-examine many of their assumptions, methodologies and practices. (shrink)

To understand how the photoreceptor protein rhodopsin performs in its role as a receptor, its structure needs to be determined at the atomic level. Upon receiving a photon of light, rhodopsin undergoes a change in conformation that allows it to bind and activate the C-protein, transducin. An important future goal should be to determine the structure of both the inactive and the photoactivated state of rhodopsin, R*. This should provide the groundwork necessary for experiments on how rhodopsin achieves its (...) signaling state R*, and how R* functions to activate transducin. To do this, the crystal structure of both rhodopsin and R* must be determined. Few membrane proteins have been successfully crystallized, so this is not a trivial undertaking. Two- or three dimensional crystals of rhodopsin must be prepared that are well ordered, to produce a high-resolution structure. Rhodopsin must be purified to homogeneity and the appropriate detergent(s) selected for crystallization experiments. Long-term thermal stability of the rhodopsin-detergent complex must be achieved in the presence of a precipitant. Two-dimensional crystals may offer advantages in investigating the structure of R*, but the structure obtained may be limited in resolution. It is necessary to work with rhodopsin in the dark, unless suitable light-stable retinal derivatives are developed. Protein engineering of rhodopsin offers attractive opportunities to improve its ability to crystallize, but is presently hindered by the absence of a high-yielding expression system. Knowledge of the structure of rhodopsin will have general importance. Because rhodopsin is a member of the family of C-protein-coupled receptors, knowledge of the structure and the mechanism of action of rhodopsin suggests by analogy how other members of the receptor family may function. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a water management project in the remote Aboriginal community of Milingimbi, Northern Australia. Drawing on materials and experiences from two distinct stages of this project, we revisit a policy report and engage in ethnographic storytelling in order to highlight a series of sensing practices associated with water management. In the former, a working symmetry between Yolngu and Western water knowledges is actively sought through the practices of the project. However, in the latter, recurrent asymmetries in the (...) research work continue to appear: a bilingual diagram of water usage is displayed but produces confusion; measuring a water hole for salinity, a member of the scientific team throws in a water meter, while a Yolngu elder prefers the telling of an ancestral story; a collaborative 3-D mapping exercise invites participation from community members but struggles to develop an outcome that differs from existing maps used by scientists and government staff. Focusing on these moments as subtle points of rupture, we suggest that attending to “seeing,” “telling,” and “mapping” in both stages of this water management project offers a way to explore the political work of crafting climate futures and beginning to interrogate differing means for “doing difference” within them. (shrink)

We here describe research into the formal specification and implementation of resource-bounded agents. In particular, we provide an overview of our work on incorporating resource limitations into executable agent specifications. In addition, we outline future directions, highlighting both their promise and their problems.

Inspired by the life and works of GrammyAward® winning artist, Lil Nas X, we explore ways a young Black queer musician has enacted emancipatory utopias to disrupt dominant cultural modes of being—offering unapologetic expressions and expansions of race, gender, and sexual identity. In this paper, we draw upon José Esteban Muñoz and Ytasha Womak to consider how utopian thinking through the lenses of queer futurity and Afrofuturism provides a way to dismantle the hegemonic and proleptic trappings of music education and (...) contemplate how music learners and teachers might enact emancipatory utopias relevant to their own historically lived experiences. (shrink)

A cultural historian synthesizes his own work in the areas of religious history and cultural studies to argue for creating a new path for ecological and cultural survival.

Singularizing progressive time bounds pasts, presents, and futures to cause-effect chains overdetermining existence in education and social life more broadly. Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place disrupts the common sense of "futures" in education or "knowledge for the future" by examining the multiplicity of possible destinies in coexistent experiences of living and learning. Taking place is the intention this book has to embody and word multiplicity across the landscapes that sustain life. The book contends that Indigenous perspectives open spaces (...) for new forms of sociality and relationships with knowledge, time, and landscapes. Through Goanna walking and caring for Country; conjuring encounters between forests, humans, and the more-than-human; dreams, dream literacies, and planes of existence; the spirit realm taking place; ancestral luchas; Musquem Land pedagogies; and resoluteness and gratitude for atunhetsla/the spirit within, the chapters in the collection become politicocultural and (hi)storical statements challenging the singular order of the future towards multiple encounters of all that is to come. In doing so, Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place offers various points of departure to (hi)story educational futures more responsive to the multiplicities of lives in what has not yet become. The contributors in this volume are Indigenous women, women of Indigenous backgrounds, Black, Red, and Brown women, and women whose scholarship is committed to Indigenous matters across spaces and times. Their work in the chapters often defies prescriptions of academic conventions, and at times occupies them to enunciate ontologies of the not yet. As people historically fabricated "women," their scholarly production critically intervenes on time to break teleological education that births patriarchal-ized and master-ized forms of living. What emerges are presences that undiscipline education and educationalized social life breaking futures out of time. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Indigenous studies, future studies, post-colonial studies in education, settler colonialism and coloniality, diversity and multiculturalism in education, and international comparative education. (shrink)

Singularizing progressive time bounds pasts, presents, and futures to cause-effect chains overdetermining existence in education and social life more broadly. Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place disrupts the common sense of "futures" in education or "knowledge for the future" by examining the multiplicity of possible destinies in coexistent experiences of living and learning. Taking place is the intention this book has to embody and word multiplicity across the landscapes that sustain life. The book contends that Indigenous perspectives open spaces (...) for new forms of sociality and relationships with knowledge, time, and landscapes. Through Goanna walking and caring for Country; conjuring encounters between forests, humans, and the more-than-human; dreams, dream literacies, and planes of existence; the spirit realm taking place; ancestral luchas; Musquem Land pedagogies; and resoluteness and gratitude for atunhetsla/the spirit within, the chapters in the collection become politicocultural and (hi)storical statements challenging the singular order of the future towards multiple encounters of all that is to come. In doing so, Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place offers various points of departure to (hi)story educational futures more responsive to the multiplicities of lives in what has not yet become. The contributors in this volume are Indigenous women, women of Indigenous backgrounds, Black, Red, and Brown women, and women whose scholarship is committed to Indigenous matters across spaces and times. Their work in the chapters often defies prescriptions of academic conventions, and at times occupies them to enunciate ontologies of the not yet. As people historically fabricated "women," their scholarly production critically intervenes on time to break teleological education that births patriarchal-ized and master-ized forms of living. What emerges are presences that undiscipline education and educationalized social life breaking futures out of time. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Indigenous studies, future studies, post-colonial studies in education, settler colonialism and coloniality, diversity and multiculturalism in education, and international comparative education. (shrink)

Engaging feminist and queer of color theory as well as work emerging from social movements, this piece critically examines narratives of impasse between Black Studies and Native Studies in the US, particularly assertions of incommensurability between the goals of Black freedom and Native sovereignty. The article outlines some of the theoretical debates between Black and Indigenous Studies that have calcified into impasses, focusing particularly on Afropessimist and Settler Colonial Studies’ framings of either slavery/anti-Blackness or settler colonialism as the foundational (...) violence around which a racist/settler modernity is structured. This article argues that approaches that emphasize relationality and the co-determination of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism can help us to think beyond a Black/Native impasse and towards a mutual futurity for both Black and Indigenous people in living in the place we currently call the United States. (shrink)

Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution was, upon its original publication, both radicacmen would be freed from the burden of childbirth, in which the nuclear family, gender roles, typical constructions of marriage and parenting are all a thing of the past, still for many seems radical, even forty-five years after its debut in 1970. With Firestone's recent passing, it is a particularly suitable time to reconsider her work in light of the medical, technological, and social (...) changes of the past few decades. Specifically, I wish to argue that the kind of future society that Firestone envisioned, which would be possible only through the use of certain medical technologies, has begun to be actualized within many trans-affirming communities. The greater the recognition of trans identities, trans lives, and trans relationships, the more we will approach the realization of the post-revolutionary society that she describes. In this essay, I consider Firestone's ideas on the issues of biological sex, gender, relationships, and parenthood, after which I will identify how present trans-affirming practices serve to support these Firestonian ideals. (shrink)

It is a widely accepted trope that museums work for future generations. They often define themselves in relation to heritage: something of the past, which is celebrated in the present and securely preserved for the future. In doing so, museums cloak themselves in a shroud of respectability for appropriately thinking in short and long terms and bravely facing future challenges. But what kind of future is at stake in this imperative to secure a heritage for (...) future generations? Taking on a deliberate speculative tone and a philosophical outlook, this essay attempts to address this question by suggesting that museums organize their work on the basis of three futures, entirely riveted to an economic understanding of temporality. Against these, the essay also proposes a fourth future that not only gives impetus to their existence, but also provides them with the only way out of the economic temporalities that govern their existence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments THE FUTURE PRESENT TENSE by Justin Leiber Perhaps the simplest, most general, and oldest claim about fiction is that it should instruct and entertain. A logical positivist might draw a sharp line between the factual content of a discourse and the pleasurable emotional release available to the auditor. Aristotle straddles this distinction in seeing (dramatic) fiction as imitation of, principally, human action, an imitation which (...) is, Aristotle assures us in Poetics, both naturally pleasurable to perform or to observe performed. The distinction is straddled because for something to be an imitation of something else it must convey some body of rough fact about that thing; and granted various conventions of form and good form, the more accurate, compact, and revealing the imitation, the more the entertainment. Indeed, Aristotle also insists that drama is more universal than history, for the poet depicts what is necessary and probable in human action, while history depicts what is actual, though perhaps improbable, and the historian may not illume what is necessary, representative, exemplary, or prophetic in the mass of supposed actualities. There is a puzzle here in Aristotle's attitude. All humans by nature desire to know is the resolute thesis of the Metaphysics and he suggests there and elsewhere that this desire is a noble one and one whose fulfillment is an important form and ingredient of happiness. In Poetics it is quite clear that both the poet and the audience must have some of the sort of stuff that Aristotle considers fully genuine knowledge, explanatory knowledge, knowledge of universals, for otherwise they could not produce or understand the work as successful (or unsuccessful) imitation of the probable, 203 204Philosophy and Literature necessary, exemplary, etc., in human action. So in entertaining the work inevitably instructs. Aristotle does say that Homer gives in hexameters an imitation of human action, while Empedocles gives in hexameters physical philosophy. But what if Empedocles were providing us psychology? The example could be made more telling if we consider a twentieth-century psychoanalytic Empedocles who tracks or elucidates some generalizations of psychology through giving imagined, or partly imaged, case histories — how would such a work be psychology as opposed to fiction? Imitation (mimesis) wouldn't do thejob, for Aristotle mentions Socratic Dialogue as a form of it. To move to contemporary instances, what may we suppose is the difference between Plato's Republic and Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet? l In Space Cadet, we find some hundred years hence a modernized version of the Platonic Republic, with an elite outgrowth of the United Nations, the "Space Patrol," playing the role of the philosopher kings to the whole earth. Heinlein presents Plato's three-component theory of human psychology and of the meritocratic, tripartite, hierarchic structure of the most real, or healthy, state, and he argues and illustrates the basic Platonic thesis. Ethics is as much an objective science as mathematics, immorality is a form of ignorance (no one knowingly does wrong), and the general solution to the problem of statescraft is the creation of an educational system that will winnow, at level after level, and further educate an intellectual/ethical elite who will monopolize ultimate weaponry and political power, who will use the "divine lie" tojustify their authority, and who will act out of ethical knowledge, not for individual gain. Heinlein gives his account of these matters from the point of view of a Mathew Dobson, a Patrol candidate, who resembles a Candide who finds himself within a reasonable facsimile of the Just State, if not the Best of All Possible Worlds. One concedes that Plato provides us a substantially original, more detailed and coherently worked out set of speculations and theories, while Heinlein provides us a perhaps banal version of these ideas in a sentimental (perhaps fascistic) vision. Similarly, one eagerly concedes that Plato's Republic has played a potent role in European Civilization and the sweep of human thought, while Space Cadet has not. But, plainly, the distinction between a work of philosophy, or of physics, and a (dramatic) fiction or science fiction, cannot be this. One can have unoriginal, false, or impotent works of physics, psychology, or philosophy. So one cannot argue on... (shrink)

Following the first enactment of living will legislation in California in 1976 the majority of the states of the USA have now passed similar laws. However, flaws have been identified in the way they work in practice and many states are considering reviewing their legislation. In Britain there is no legislation but the subject is currently commanding considerable interest. This paper assesses the future prospects for living wills in both the USA and Britain, analysing the different options available (...) and comparing the two countries. If patients who become permanently incompetent are to have their previous autonomous decision-making respected, there is general agreement that advance directives for health care must be introduced. The difficulty is in deciding how to implement them, and especially whether this should be by statutory or non-statutory means, the traditions in the two countries being very different in this respect. It is concluded that whichever route is taken, promoting respect for patient autonomy is as much a matter for education and persuasion of doctors as of the adoption of particular instruments. Doctors should therefore be trained in what constitutes good medical practice in this area and, to ensure that it can be carried out properly, the general level of medical facilities for these patients must also be protected and promoted. (shrink)

This article begins with personal reflections on becoming a feminist. I reflect on the way my feminism has shaped my work as an academic and writer. Particular attention is paid to the importance of restating feminist principles for a turbulent age where the gains of the women’s movement are under threat. If these reflections aim to restate feminist claims for the present and future, the reflections that follow from a number of young women suggest ways in which the (...) Next Generation are also thinking again – or perhaps for the first time – about the claims of feminism and the relevance to their lives. (shrink)

Work on global ethics looks at ethical connections on a global scale. It should link closely to environmental ethics, recognizing that we live in unified social-ecological systems, and to development ethics, attending systematically to the lives and interests of contemporary and future poor, marginal and vulnerable persons and groups within these systems and to the effects on them of forces around the globe. Fulfilling these tasks requires awareness of work outside academic ethics alone, in other disciplines and (...) across disciplines, in public debates and private agendas. A relevant ethics enterprise must engage in systematic description and understanding of the ethical stances that are expressed or hidden in the work of influential stakeholders and analysts, and seek to influence and participate, indeed embed itself, in the expressed and hidden choice-making involved in designing and conducting scientific research and in policy analysis and preparation; it will contribute in value-critical and interpretive policy analysis. It will explore how the allocation of attention and of concern in research and policy depend on perceptions of identity and of degrees of interconnection, and are influenced by the choice or avoidance of humanistic interpretive methodologies. The paper illustrates these themes with reference to the study of climate change. (shrink)

This work presents an overview of four different approaches to the problem of future contingency and determinism in temporal logics. All of them are bivalent, viz. they share the assumption that propositions concerning future contingent facts have a determinate truth-value. We introduce Ockhamism, Peirceanism, Actualism and T x W semantics, the four most relevant bivalent alternatives in this area, and compare them from the point of view of their expressiveness and their underlying metaphysics of time.

Statements about the future are central in everyday conversation and reasoning. How should we understand their meaning? The received view among philosophers treats will as a tense: in ‘Cynthia will pass her exam’, will shifts the reference time forward. Linguists, however, have produced substantial evidence for the view that will is a modal, on a par with must and would. The different accounts are designed to satisfy different theoretical constraints, apparently pulling in opposite directions. We show that these constraints (...) are jointly satisfied by a novel modal account of will. On this account, will is a modal but doesn't work as a quantifier over worlds. Rather, the meaning of will involves a selection function similar to the one used by Stalnaker in his semantics for conditionals. The resulting theory yields a plausible semantics and logic for will and vindicates our intuitive views about the attitudes that rational agents should have towards future-directed contents. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 75-77.