Die offene Zukunft und ihre Freunde (The Open Future and its Friends)

Climate catastrophe, AI revolution, wars – the world seems to be coming apart. In the face of great challenges, Western societies look towards the future with increasing pessimism, losing faith in liberal democracy. While many people long to return to a romanticised past, the market for hope literature is booming, literature promoting a supposed “right mindset”: Positive thinking is being tendered as the answer to collective discomfort. Between tech utopia and doomsday anxiety, we lose our grip on what would really be possible: A sober yet simultaneously hopeful way of looking at the future as an open space of possibilities. Yet how can we rationally talk about the future when forecasts are unreliable and developments become barely predictable? What effect does the loss of a hope for a better tomorrow have on a society? What is left of the enlightened promise of progress?

Florian Chefai will pursue these questions from a critical rationalism perspective, as developed by philosophers Karl Popper and Hans Albert, among others. He shows that an open society is founded not on certainties, but on the ability to learn and the courage to face transience – and why this exactly is its resilience against the crises of our times.