The Past of the Futures: Inquiries Taking the Lens of Economic Philosophy

Deadline: 18.01.2026

A fundamental assumption underlying many approaches in economics, ethics, and philosophy is that actorship involves taking future-oriented actions and influencing the conditions for the realization of future states. From this perspective, human action connects the past and the future; and human beings, endowed with scientific knowledge, can achieve some control over future states of affairs. An epistemic, an ontological, and a pragmatic problem can be associated with this. The epistemic problem, as Frank Knight has put it, refers to the reasonableness of projecting knowledge from the past to future states when the conditions for the applicability of that knowledge have eroded because the future is not the past. The ontological problem is based on assumptions about the nature of the social reality in which we act. Does this reality allow for a connection between the past and future based on human action? The pragmatic problem has to do with how our projects change because we act as part of the world, observe how we and others act, and make predictions about future states based on that observation. The common denominator of all problems is that something that is of our making cannot be independent of us.

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Veranstalter
Journal of Philosophical Economics (J Philos Econ)

E-Mail Veranstalter
editor@jpe.ro; Michaela.Haase@fu-berlin.de

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