A new special section of the Journal of Philosophical Economics, The Past of the Futures: Inquiries Taking the Lens of Economic Philosophy, has been published in collaboration with the DGPhil Working Group on Economic Philosophy and Ethics.
The contributions emerged from the Working Group’s Annual Meeting in St. Gallen in September 2025 and the Economists’ Philosophy Day in November 2025. The special section features contributions by
- Bishakha Dutta, When Rules Run Out: Cicero’s De Officiis and the Ethics of Transparency in Commercial Transaction
- Leonardo Ivarola, Alfredo Garcia, and Martín Szybisz, Beyond Order: Contingency, Recursion, and Metastability in Economics
- Pascal Stiefenhofer and Cristina Neesham, On the Geometry of Time in Rational Agency
- Michael Seewald, Messianic Economics: The Entrepreneur as the Agent of Uncertain Futures in Modern Economic Ecosystems
Taking the relationship between past and future as their point of departure, the guest editors and co-chairs of the Working Group, Michaela Haase, Verena Rauen, and Ingrid Becker, draw in their introduction to the special section on economist and philosopher Frank Knight, who identified a paradox in this relationship: the possibility of solving future problems rests on knowledge generated in the past for a future in which social reality may have changed. Building on this insight, the special section demonstrates how different conceptualizations of the relationship between past and future shape core concepts such as agency, change, and responsibility in economics, philosophy, and ethics.
The guest editors consider uncertainty as an opportunity to rethink these concepts. It highlights forms of knowledge, judgment, and practical orientation that become indispensable when continuity can no longer be taken for granted and certainty fades—while emphasizing that expectations which are inevitably based on past experiences, do not rule out open possibilities.
