The future is always uncertain. But today it is possibly more unknown than ever. For World Philosophy Day 2024, we asked leading thinkers how philosophy can help us navigate this future. Together, their reflections challenge us to think deeper, question more boldly, and reimagine our shared path forward.
To navigate life in a confusing world, one must develop an understanding of self and its place and role in nature, for life is the development of the self and its contribution to nature. Philosophy is always the route towards this understanding, even when done implicitly and reflexively. Today, the mainstream cultural narrative in the West is that the self is a by-product of evanescent material arrangements, and that life is mostly—if not solely—about the self. Your life is about you, mine about me—or so the story goes, even among professional wellbeing specialists. Yet, this notion is poor philosophy, for we are a product of nature, and always a part of it. Our life and role in the world are no more about ourselves—as opposed to the world—than the life and role of an apple blossom is about the apple blossom—as opposed to the apple tree. A neurotic apple blossom living according to this flawed philosophy of life wouldn’t play its role in the grander scheme of apple trees and nature at large: that or forming a viable seed and then making way for the fruit. Instead, it would fruitlessly struggle to remain forever open and fresh. Our life is lived only once; we only have one draft and no chance for revision. We’d thus do well to reflect seriously on the philosophy of life that—whether we’re aware of it or not—informs how we live. The alternative is a poor, thoughtless draft.
Bernardo Kastrup is a philosopher and computer scientist, advocating for metaphysical idealism—the notion that reality is fundamentally mental.
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How can philosophy help us navigate an uncertain or unknown future? By looking back to the past.
I have sometimes been disappointed by how little the history of philosophy is actually taught in philosophy courses. It is not enough to give students the tools of philosophical reasoning, they must also understand where and how these tools came about so that they don’t end up reinventing previously formulated solutions.
Too often we imagine that the challenges we face, both individually and collectively, are entirely unique. And while it is true that each era of human history has brought about its own kinds of struggles, we should not underestimate how much we have in common with the thinkers of the past, with their hopes, dreams and anxieties. The sheer volume of Seneca quotes shared daily on Instagram appears to indicate that even a thinker born circa 4 BC can still be relatable. Today, I am struck by the prescience and relatability of a French philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose words, despite having been written over 90 years ago, resonate now more than ever: “Mankind lies groaning, half-crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands.” Despite their ignorance of our current problems, philosophers of the past still have a lot to say to the present.
Emily Herring is a freelance writer and editor. She is the author of the first biography of Henri Bergson in English Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People.
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It is often expected that professional philosophers would laud their life endeavours for their unending potential to contribute to human flourishing. I however cannot muster the desire to do so. Academic philosophy has failed to shift, much less, question, the predominant dogmas of our time. As academics, philosophy often becomes little more than the rationalization of our biases, the reification of our personal politics as a normative theory, and the repetition of societal norms as transcendental truths hidden behind a method of inquiry that gives the illusion that it is the consequence of rigour and scrutiny.
There was a time when thinking required the suspension of presumed knowledge and audacity to confront the ills of a civilization and epoch. This is no longer the case. Academic philosophers forget all too easily that one lifetime is far short to remedy the evil of centuries, and that calling oneself a philosopher does not give one access to ethereal insights.
Often the insights of Black thinkers are reduced to the criticisms they make of racism or colonialism within Europe’s fields of knowledge. However, what is readily apparent in their words is their understanding of the thinking that determines the livelihood of one’s time. W.E.B. DuBois once said:
We are face to face with the greatest tragedy that has ever overtaken the world. The collapse of Europe is to us the more astounding because of the boundless faith which we have had in European civilization. We have long believed without argument or reflection that the cultural status of the people of Europe and of North America represented not only the best civilization which the world had ever known, but also a goal of human effort destined to go on from triumph to triumph until the perfect accomplishment was reached. Our present nervous breakdown, nameless fear, and often despair, comes from the sudden facing of this faith with calamity (The World and Africa, [2007], 1).
Uncertainty in the future is intimately related to the chaos defining the thinking and political struggles in Europe and North America. DuBois rejects these geographies as the lands upon which humanity or its greatest ideas were perfected.
Over the last decade, Europe and North America have turned to the ideas of white nationalism, folk ideology, and outright war to reclaim the culture and civilization it believes to have lost. These are decadent ideas that philosophy once proudly proclaimed were extinguished by liberalism. Perhaps it is time for the academic philosopher to consider that the small sections of the white world claiming they birthed civilization and are therefore tasked with guarding philosophy, are little more than apologists seeking to sustain the societies attempting the resuscitation of a tyrannical civilization.
It is difficult to see how academic philosophy can provide answers to tides of growing ethnonationalism, dehumanization, and violence in the 21st-century world, when as a discipline it operates through similar logics. Philosophy in the U.K., U.S. and Europe is governed by an almost all white racial homogeneity that utilises an apartheid-like structures to exclude populations who articulate philosophy’s centuries-long role in perpetuating human misery. This Western-style academic philosophy functions as the life-support of the West’s dehumanizing ethos, not an endeavour enabling human flourishing.
Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, specializing in Africana philosophy, critical race theory, and the philosophy of race and gender.
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I imagine World Philosophy Day as a cross between the symposium, Plato’s famous drinking party, and Just a Minute, the British Radio 4 panel show where contestants improvise fluently for a minute on a randomly selected topic unless disqualified for hesitation, repetition or deviation. I picture our host triumphantly unveiling the theme—philosophy and an uncertain or unknown future—to a gathering of the good, bad, and just plain mad from the history of philosophy who immediately complain the future is necessarily unknown. Scowling until they quieten down, he takes the chair’s prerogative to open proceedings. ‘Philosophy penetrates beneath the surface of things which appear uncertain only because they are shadows. It draws us toward a deeper knowledge of true form.’ He pauses for dramatic effect, ‘HESITATION’ roars his neighbour, a scientific gentleman from Central Macedonia, who takes up the thread. ‘Philosophy does indeed get below the surface but not to some otherworldly mystery, to a truer understanding of nature itself. Uncertainty is simply incomplete knowledge.’
‘CONTRADICTION,’ calls an ugly gentleman from Athens. ‘How do you know what you do not know?’ he adds with a twinkle in eye, ‘the real purpose of philosophy is not to escape uncertainty but to reconcile ourselves to it.’ ‘YES,’ gasps a wild eyed Austrian by his side, ‘it’s all just a language game, uncertainty means we have freed ourselves from a bottleneck of words’ ‘NONSENSE’ barks a bearded German, ‘philosophy is not a bourgeois therapy, its job is to change the world. Uncertainty is just the fissure between structure and superstructure under capitalism laid bare.’ ‘PATRIARCHY’ interrupts an elegant Parisian, ‘uncertainty is a masculine concept, women have always been expected to live in a world that is not organised in line with their experience.’ ‘RACISM’ interjects the man from Martinique, ‘uncertainty is an epistemic violence, a necessary catharsis for the people crushed beneath the coloniser’s pernicious philosophy.’
As the game goes on, I imagine silent waiters clearing empties and exchanging knowing glances as if to say, ‘well at least it keeps them happy’, and perhaps, in a way, they’re right. Maybe the real value of philosophy in uncertain times lies less with the answers it gives or denies than with the simple fact of doing it, of staking a claim to think for oneself instead of disappearing in other people’s ideas.
Sophie Scott-Brown is a fellow in intellectual history at the University of St. Andrews and author of Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy.
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Suppose human beings survive for another thousand years. You may think that’s unlikely, but it’s certainly possible, so what do you think we’d be like in 3024? Perhaps AI robots will do all our work for us, as we lounge around drinking prosecco. With the robots taking care of business, human life might begin to resemble a happy retirement, a time when people finally get to do the gardening, yachting, collecting, or painting they always wanted to do, but couldn’t because they had to work instead.
But people wouldn’t need to advance to achieve that. The technology would, but it wouldn’t be fair to make scientists and technologists work while the rest of us live it up, so you’d hope the robots could take care of technological development themselves. In the Happy Retirement Land of 3024, the people there could be just like us.
I find that disappointing. If aliens ever land here, I’d be expecting some kind of superior wisdom. If they were just space tourists drinking prosecco, with none of their people understanding how their technology worked anymore, we ought to tell them to clear off.
For human beings to be impressive in 3024 our minds need to advance – which doesn’t seem unrealistic given that worldwide educational standards rocketed in the last century. We would all know a lot more science, that goes without saying, but we can’t all be scientists. We could all be philosophers, however. We could become a philosophical species in which absolutely everyone reflects on the nature of reality, at first with awe, and then as our minds progress, with understanding. We could guide our lives rationally with this understanding. We could guide our technology too and hence have some chance of making it to 3024.
Plato didn’t like democracy and thought we should instead be ruled by Philosopher Kings and Queens. Here’s an updated version of his idea: let’s keep democracy but turn all the voters into philosophers. Once you get into philosophy you think big, so you care about things like the future of the human race, the direction we’re collectively heading in – so that’s the kind of thing we’d vote on, rather than the present “plan” of leaving it to Musk and Zuckerberg to battle it out in the marketplace over whether we’re heading for other planets or virtual reality.
James Tartaglia is a Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Keele University, author of Inner Space Philosophy.
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We have for the most part imagined that we know a great deal about the world and our circumstances but there are aspects of the world that we have yet to understand.
The legacy of the Enlightenment has given us the impression that while we know a great deal about the world there is still much to discover. But the world is unknown in a more profound sense. We are all acutely aware of the proliferating and often divisive perspectives that surround us, and which threaten conflict, uncertainty and the future as a whole. Yet many, perhaps most, imagine that their version of the world, their account of how things are, is in large part the true and correct version of things. There is widespread recognition that our accounts and understanding of the world are perspectival, but at the same time we still want there to be a correct version that somehow escapes perspective. Yet such a conclusion is not plausible. If our accounts of the world are necessarily perspectival, there is no God's eye view to approach or retreat to. There is no knowledge, there are no unchallengeable truths, or universal versions of events.
In the 18th century, Kant set out to demonstrate how knowledge was possible and in the process to draw limits to its reach. In the 21st century, the challenge is the reverse, to demonstrate how even though knowledge is not possible, we can intervene in the world with accuracy and precision, and how even though we have only models and metaphors for reality we are nevertheless able to modify and refine these to enable outcomes we deem desirable. Instead of digging ourselves ever deeper into our particular silos, we need to find ways to interact with alternative accounts of the world but at the same time identify how this can be achieved without assuming that one of them is correct and others mistaken. Just as philosophy was central to the original Enlightenment so it now needs to fashion new ways to make sense of the world and enable us all to thrive in the great adventure of being alive.
Hilary Lawson is a post-postmodern philosopher and Director of the Institute of Art and Ideas.
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The future is always unknown, but it may be especially uncertain right now as we see, among other things, the development of a technology that has the potential to reshape our economies and may lead us to question what we as real human beings (as distinct from artificial intelligence) are worth if we are replaceable from a corporate standpoint. What is the value of our lives if machines are more hard-working, clever or adept than us? Philosophy will be a resource that is more important than ever before, because philosophy (like religion or spirituality) has the power to validate the value of all experience for its own sake, and knowledge as an interior possession rather than an outer trapping. Real experience and real knowledge are things artificial intelligence will never attain to. It also allows us to ask whether our worldly existence is the sum of who we are. Regardless of our answer to that, philosophy can help us confront our powers or powerlessness with an understanding of what life is worth living for, and what may justify suffering or struggle.
Katerina Apostolides is a leading philosophical counsellor based in Athens, Greece.
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In my experience, there is a particular combination of two major Greco-Roman philosophies that are best positioned to help us navigate the future, which is always uncertain and largely unknown. One such philosophy is Stoicism, the other skepticism, in the form practiced at the Platonic Academy by the likes of Carneades of Cyrene and the Roman philosopher, public advocate, and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero.
One of the crucial notions of Stoicism, especially in the version articulated by the second century teacher Epictetus of Hierapolis, draws a sharp distinction between things that are up to us, i.e., for which we are responsible, and things that are not up to us, i.e., for which it is not reasonable to hold ourselves responsible. According to Epictetus, pretty much the only things that are up to us are our deliberate judgments, the values we endorse, and our decisions to act or not to act in certain ways. Everything else is not up to us because it ultimately depends on a number of factors that we don’t control. The future falls squarely among the things that are not up to us. Epictetus counsels to focus our efforts where our agency lies, and to develop an attitude of acceptance and equanimity for the things that we don’t control. The best way to deal with the future, in other words, is to act here and now.
The sort of Academic Skepticism advocated by Carneades and Cicero is based on a probabilistic and fallibilist attitude toward knowledge: we pretty much never achieve certainty about things, especially when it comes to the future. But that doesn’t mean we need to remain entirely agnostic, or that we cannot act. Rather, a good skeptic assesses—on the basis of the best available evidence—the likelihood of certain things to occur or not, and acts accordingly. A crucial corollary of this attitude is that we ought to keep an open mind about altering our course whenever the evidence changes. As a later skeptic, David Hume, famously put it, wise persons proportion their beliefs to the evidence.
So here is the recipe, then: (i) Focus on what is actionable; (ii) Mentally prepare to accept what is outside of your control; (iii) Assess your courses of action on the basis of facts. Happy navigating!
Massimo Pigliucci is an author, blogger, podcaster, as well as the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York.
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Philosophy is typically thought of as a contemplative discipline, practiced in times of peace and prosperity. And yet, in a time of rapid change and turmoil, as we are now, philosophy has never been more relevant.
Global challenges we face include threats to democracy, conflict, the rise of populism and spread of misinformation, the nature and capacities of artificial agents and what that means for human beings living in the age of AI. Other looming issues are the consequences of climate change for the planet, for different species and for the future of humanity. This concerns our long-term survival but in the medium term, it raises issues of inequality and the legitimacy of migration and the integrity of nation states.
Tackling these issues requires fundamental thinking: thinking about what we mean by democracy and how much we value it. Is it the best way to govern a population? As Jo Wolff points out in his Introduction to Political Philosophy, we are concerned with two key questions: Who gets what? And who decides who gets what? And if democracy has the answers, what form should democracy take: should it direct or only representative of the people’s will? Without getting clear on these points the discussion will be diffuse and ultimately lead nowhere.
When it comes to the rise of misinformation, we need to grapple with the appeal to conspiracy theories and why truth isn’t so much abandoned as subjugated to how people feel and to poorly evidenced opinions masquerading as substantiated truths. As Bernard Williams pointed out in Truth and Truthfulness, even those who reject the objectivity of science and are sceptical of claims to truth, are sincere in what they say, want to convince and not be hoodwinked. The problem isn’t so much that truth drops out of the picture but those pursuing their own view of what’s true need a stronger grip on what it means to ‘do their own research’. Merely searching the internet for views confirming their own is not a high enough standard of scrutiny. Meanwhile, scientist must acknowledge the fact that many established theories will come be overturned without that undermining science, and that hypotheses may have a probability of being correct, which falls some way short of certainty. The quest for certainty, with low standards of scrutiny may encourage conspiracy thinking or what Quassim Cassam in his book, Conspiracy Theories, has called epistemic insouciance, a vice in our ways of thinking.
The rapid rise of AI has taken many by surprise, including those in the tech industry. Should we see large language models as tools or colleagues? How safe are AI assistants and should we recognize them, as Yuval Noah Harari is willing to do, as self-determining agents who can make potentially harmful decisions? Or should we instead see these AI systems as Shannon Vallor does in her book The AI Mirror, as reflections of our own natures and failings? Do they mirror what we want to see and long for, and will this hold us back rather than advance us as a species? Generative AI could contribute greatly to the advance of science and medicine, but the call for responsible AI is growing and increasingly industry is turning to philosophers for help in thinking how to benchmark the capabilities of AI systems and regulate their development.
When it comes to our future as a species, what obligations do we owe nature including other species and the planet? Can biodiversity be conserved and the planet saved without creating widescale injustices? Frameworks for addressing this are already being set out by philosophers like Chris Armstrong in his Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis.
Finally, we will all face the big issue of how by 2050 we can feed a population of 10 billion within planetary boundaries. Philosophers like Julian Baggini have given serious thought to the principles for a global food philosophy in his book How the World Eats. On world Philosophy Day there is at least still plenty food for thought.
Barry C. Smith is a professor of philosophy and director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. He is also the founding director of the Centre for the Study of the Senses.
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