Editorial

Time and the Future in the Literature of Futures Studies

Similarly, a scan of Futures, one of the oldest and most highly regarded English language journals in the futures field, from its first issue in 1969 to 2016, revealed that “time” might be mentioned in a paragraph or two, but not much more. In Futures, and some other sources, I encountered only eighteen studies that I felt most seriously examined the basic concepts of the futures field. While I cannot say my survey was exhaustive, and I certainly have missed some, these essays are all I could find in the English language futures literature that seriously problematized time and the notion that “the future lies ahead” (Aaltonen 2009; Adam 1994; Adam and Groves 2007; Apostol 1972; Brier 2005; Bussey 2007; Dator 1979; de Jouvenel 1993; Galtung and Inayatullah 1997; Inayatullah 1993, 1998; Kuosa 2011; McHale 1978; Milojevic 2007; Poli 2011, 2016; Valaskakis 1976; Wallerstein 1998). The material by Inayatullah, Milojevic, Kuosa, and Poli deals especially directly and well with the fundamental ideas about time that I consider to be most important for futures studies.

In my own case, in the article cited, I distinguished between Mechanical time measured by clocks and calendars; Biological time exhibited by the cycle of life from birth, maturity, to death; by the seasons; and by circadian rhythms; and Psychological time exemplified by the slowing of time when we are bored, the speeding up of time when we are highly focused, and the chaos of time induced by illness, trances, or drugs. These three are all well discussed in the literature on time—especially mechanical time which has been so important in creating and controlling modern societies and is the one aspect of time most futurists are likely to consider to some extent. The essay by Hughes de Jouvenel cited above is a good example of this.

However, I added two other kinds of time—Celebrated (or memorialized) time, exemplified by birthdays, holidays, and the Christian Mass (whether understood as consubstantiation or transubstantiation), asking “what are the holidays that celebrate the future?” of which New Year’s Day is the best example; and Built time—the question answered when you look around and ask, “what time is this place?”—what era, or mix of eras, does the surrounding landscape, roads, buildings, power lines, and so on, embody? This was an understanding of time that I learned from Kevin Lynch (1972). As we will see, I missed many other important features of, and questions about, time, but I at least recognized that there was more to time for futurists than something that flowed from the past, to the present, and into the future “ahead.”

It should be noted that a few people in the literature I surveyed, mainly historians, considered the relationship between futures studies and history, sometimes discussing the relationship between the two disciplines in ways that problematized certain aspects of time (Adam 2010; Andersson 2012; Briggs 1978; Connelly 2013; Engerman 2012; Kaivo-oja et al. 2004; Patomaki and Steger 2010; Staley 2002, 2007; Voros 2013; Wagar 1989, 1991, 2002).

Modern futures studies emerged soon after the Second World War during the time the west seemed dominant everywhere in the world—or thought it was. With some exceptions, early futurists apparently unconsciously adopted the Abrahamic/western/Enlightenment view of the future that understood time to be both linear and ultimately (potentially) progressive. Most futurists, then and now, have simply assumed without question that Time’s Arrow is real, headed toward “the future,” and cannot be reversed or stopped, though it can be directed to a significant extent by human intentions and activities. “The future lies ahead” is a phrase repeated over and over without any consideration of just where “ahead” might be. Moreover, one of the duties of a futurist and purposes of futures studies is repeatedly said to be to strive to make the future better than the present or the past. Some prominent futurists also have a strong teleological element (Fuller 1969; Hubbard 1998; Kurzweil 2005; Teilhard de Chardin 1964).

Most of the founders of futures studies came from Europe and North America. But at the same time, there were, among the founders, scholars and activists from many other parts of the world. However, I believe that all of the nonwestern futurists were educated in the west and/or by western scholars and scholarship, and so they seem to have accepted the western linear and progressive view of time without notable exception. Moreover, though the early futurists spoke many native languages, all of them were also educated via some western language, be it Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, or Swedish—primarily English, French, or German initially. Each of these languages considers time somewhat differently, both within the structure of each language and by the choice of words and metaphors used to express various features of time. Thus, when one writes about the future in Finnish, French, German, or Hungarian there is often a tension with what the same person might write about the same idea in English. For example, many people use the word “futures” in the plural in English, but when writing in their own language they use their word for the future in the singular. And yet, whether it is “the future” or “alternative futures” is potentially of significant consequence (Dator 2009).

Time and the Future in Other Cultures

Nonetheless, for all futurists, I believe, the future lies ahead, and the past is behind, while they themselves live in the present that is temporally “now” and physically “here” some place. There was not a single scholar I am aware of who was educated primarily in an indigenous language, who used indigenous concepts and metaphors, or who expressed different notions about “the future.” And yet, the future lies behind for native Hawaiian speakers. They face the past and see it gradually fade over the horizon in front of them, while the future emerges more or less unexpectedly from behind them. Other cultures have other very different ideas (Bae 2014; Boroditsky 2001; Boroditsky and Gaby 2010; Hodges 2008; Hömke et al. 2013; Lee 2007; Levine 1998; Maxwell 1972; Munn 1992; Núñez and Cooperrider 2013; Núñez et al. 2012; Núñez and Sweetser 2006; Postill 2002; Shin 1988). I think it is high time for futures studies based on non-European languages and cultures to emerge, or reemerge, and to enlarge and enrich our understanding of the phenomena we are studying.

Time in Greece and Europe

Most discussions of time simply take for granted a particular kind of time, one which was invented for modern Europe beginning in the Quattrocento and perfected in the nineteenth century, one which has been specific to a particular phase of western culture, and its empiricist tendencies. This kind of time has been broadly challenged since the turn of the twentieth century and across the range of practice from art to physics, and a new kind of time has emerged from these challenges. Just as “modern” time emerged from the Renaissance, so what might be called postmodern or discursive time has emerged from the tectonic cultural shifts of the past century. (Ermarth 2010, 133)

Indeed, there is a vast literature on time, memory, and anticipation that is completely uninformed by futures studies and which seems not to have influenced futurists’ ideas about time in any serious way either. Time is a much more complicated thing for philosophers, physicists, biologists (especially neuroscientists), and psychologists than it seems to be for futurists. I surveyed a large number of essays, books, and collections that seriously deal with time, and, except as already noted, not only was not a single author a futurist but also none showed any awareness of futures studies as an academic field until very recently and then in rare cases.

One the distinguishing features of this literature is that while there are many firmly held and passionately articulated views about time and the future, there is no consensus on anything. Unless otherwise cited, I have relied primarily on discussions in the following collections for my understanding of “time” in philosophy, history, physics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology: Dyke and Bardon (2013), Fraser (1996), Nicolaidis and Achtner (2013), and Sandbothe (2001). Sections in quotes from Heraclitus through Kant, below, come from Benjamin (1996).

One of the things I have noted in reviewing this literature is that it seems impossible to question or discuss the existence of “time” without using terms that assume its existence, so deeply ingrained in our “commonsense” and languages are certain phrases and metaphors. As Heidegger put it,

in order to speak in keeping with the ontological character of our theme here, we must talk temporally about time. We wish to repeat temporally the question of what time is. Time is the “how.” If we inquire into what time is, then one may not cling prematurely to an answer (time is such and such), for this always means a “what” . . . The fundamental assertion that time is temporal is therefore the most authentic determination . . . Time itself is meaningless: time is temporal. (Sandbothe 2001, 114, emphasis in original)

As is the case in almost all academic endeavors or concepts, discussions of time begin with the same set of Greek philosophers who defined and debated a set of categories and distinctions that still underlie all of the current discussions about time. “Among the many controversies carried on among the early Greek philosophers, that of becoming or change versus being or permanence was one of the most prominent” (emphasis in original). Heraclitus (535–475 BCE) is the most well-remembered proponent of the primacy of flux and change. He is famous for the statement, “You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” However, the philosopher Cratylus (late fifth century BCE?) did Heraclitus one better by “adding that you cannot step into the same river once: the river is changing and gone even as a single event of stepping occurs” (Oxford Index 2016).

Against Heraclitus and Cratylus, Parmenides (540 BCE?) and Zeno (490–430 BCE) asserted that “only the permanent and enduring are real, and all time, flux, motion and change are unreal.” Zeno especially is remembered for his famous paradox of the race with no end, arguing that “you cannot traverse an infinite number of points in a finite time.” Thus, motion—and hence the passage of time—is an illusion. Things appear to move, but do not.

Plato (428–347 BCE) in effect resolved this controversy by dividing the world between a timeless realm of ideal forms and essence that is permanent and unchanging, and a realm of matter and the physical manifestation of those ideal forms which is constantly changing, and in which time is experienced. His famous allegory of the cave exemplifies this: chained men, their backs to the light, only see (and sense as real) the flickering shadows of the ideal forms behind them.

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) went more deeply into the study of time than any of his predecessors. His definition of time was the “number of motion in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after,’” therefore linking time to motion (and thus eventually to space). By this definition, he also avoided having to discuss how things come into and pass out of existence, as well as unintentional motion. “Time cannot exist without change . . . ,” but “time is a combination of change and permanence.” For Aristotle, time is arrow-like and unidirectional. “The unit of time must be in the form of a vector whose direction is fixed and whose length indicates lapse of time.”

In many ways, Aristotle can be considered to have had the last word on time until the early modern era. Nonetheless, one of the thinkers almost always quoted in any serious discussion of time is St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354–430 AD). He is best known for asking, after a long soliloquy on the matter: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not . . .” Augustine was especially perplexed by the issue of the objectivity of time versus its subjectivity, tentatively concluding,

It is in you, O my mind, that I measure time. I do not measure the things themselves whose passage produced the impress; it the impress that I measure when I measure time. Thus either that is what time is, or I am not measuring time at all. (The Confessions of Saint Augustine Book XI 1909–1914)

Although St. Thomas Aquinas (1125–1274) had a lot to say on time, as he did on everything else, he basically followed Aristotle so that time did not become a serious issue in western philosophy again until John Locke (1632–1704). Locke

was opposed to the view, formerly argued by Plato and Descartes, and later to be developed by Leibniz and Kant, that there are ideas which are presupposed by experience and have to be taken for granted before any sensory knowledge is possible.

For Locke, “our ideas come from two sources—sensation and reflection.” Our ideas of time come from reflecting on the sensations of the succession of events and the duration of the distance between the succession.

Isaac Newton (1642–1717), whose ideas still influence much of physics and contemporary science generally, expressed his view of time very clearly: “absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration . . .” Time for Newton was thus absolute, eternal, and objective. Therefore, it is reversible. Time’s arrow can move in either direction.

Leibniz (1646–1716) “stood between Locke and Kant in his conception of the role which the mind plays in our knowledge of the external world.” He did so by positing a distinction between two different kinds of time—“one which is potential and ideal and the other which is actual and real.” The former is the time of God and the latter is time as experienced by humans.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

can best be understood in terms of his reactions to Newton, Leibniz and Hume. While he agreed with Newton that absolute time is independent of content, he was unwilling to go along with the great scientist in making it into an entity having reality the mind of the individual. Leibniz, he argued, was wrong in believing that time is an idealization of existing relations between things.

Time “is merely a form of intuition ‘built into’ the mind in such a way that we must see phenomena as temporal . . .”

Time and Islam

For this section, I have relied entirely on Böwering (1997), Goodman (1992), and Weintritt (2007). All quotations come from one or the other of these three sources. “Time is pervasive in Islamic history, central to language and poetry, indispensable in Islamic astronomy and music, constitutive for Islamic ritual and law, and crucial in Islamic theology, cosmology, and philosophy.” Although strongly influenced by the arguments about time discussed in ancient Greece that we just reviewed above, time in Islamic thought is in many ways unique.

The Arabic language has no verbs for “to be” and “to become,” and does not use past, present, and future grammatical tenses. But there are many words for various aspects of time.

The most common Islamic term for time, zamwin, does not appear in the Qur’an, nor does qidam, its counterpart for eternity. The Arab lexicographers, however, had a great variety of terms for time. In general, they distinguished dahr, time from the beginning of the world to its end, from zaman, a long time having both beginning and end; Casr, a span of time; bin, a period of time, little or much; dawim, duration; mudda, a space of duration; waqt, a moment in time; in, present time; awmn time or season; yawm, a time, whether night or day; and sia, a while or an hour. (Emphasis in original)

To the Arabic poets of the pre-Islamic period, time (dahr) was viewed fatalistically, as an enemy that was at the root of all human problems. However, the Qur’an (45:24) is interpreted as directly rejecting this negative notion of time: “It is God who gives you life and causes you to die, and who will gather you on the day of resurrection, of which there is no doubt.” That is to say, God specifically created time so that humans would have a chance to experience life and to choose between good and evil so they could be tested in the Final Judgment: “Time in the Qur’an is the precarious moral span of history suspended between judgment and creation.”

From this perspective, time simply provides an arena for human life. The temporality of life on earth provides the conditions under which man can fulfill the commandments of divine law. A possible future—as thought or even planned—is dependent on God’s will, which eludes mankind’s understanding. This explains why Muslims typically express reservations regarding the future modifying any statement about the future by saying, in sha allah: “If God is willing.” Nothing happens except as the will of God.

This may sound fatalistic and predeterminative, but that is not the case. For al-Ash’ari (d. 935) and others, even though everything is according to God’s will, each person is morally responsible for his actions not because he is their creator—God is their creator—but because each person accepts or acquiesces in the choices.

However, there is another way in which time is special in Islam. One large group of Islamic philosophers held an atomistic view of the world, similar to that espoused by the Greek philosopher Democritus (460–370 BCE), according to which time does not flow, as our minds mislead us to believe. Time is atomistic. God creates the world repeatedly over and over again with each instance independent of the one before and after it. “God’s creative act was therefore called upon repeatedly to recreate the universe,” “Time and space on this account were atomized as well as matter; causality was strictly vertical” (i.e., entirely due to the will of God).

This atomistic view of time was especially espoused by the theologians of the kalam. However, there was another view put forward by the falasifa, philosophers who used Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic arguments to understand time. Within these two broad schools, there were many thinkers who expressed perspectives similar to those we saw among the Greeks, save for the fact that the kalam school was more clearly grounded in the Quran.

For adherents of kalam, natural causality, change, and motion are illusory as, given their atomistic perspective, nothing persists long enough to move. Our senses mislead us by constructing images of motion from successions of stasis.

With the infusion of Platonism into Islam by translation into Arabic, the timeless paradigm of God’s thought or wisdom became the basis of the intellectual world of the falasifa. Al-Ghazali (1058–1111) abandoned atomism and adopted the Aristotelian relative time and space conception. Al-Ghazali says that God transcends directionalities.

For Him, there is no up or down, left or right, forward or back, since all of these terms have meaning only relative to our particular type of body. If we were spherical (as the world is), the notions of directionality appropriate for us would be different: all is relative to our mode of being.

Time, as a feature of nature, is relative to the motions of bodies and to the perceptions of those beings that measure such motions. The same event is spoken of as past or future, depending on one’s point of view.

Time in India, China, and Japan

Discussions similar to some of these were also occurring among Asian philosophers. Hajime Nakamura summarizes the essence of the notion of time in Indian philosophy this way:

In Indian thought, time, like other phenomena, is conceived statically rather than dynamically. It is of course recognized that the things of this world are always moving and changing. But the substance of things is seen as basically unchanging, its underlying reality unaffected by the ceaseless flux. The Indian does not concede that we never step into the same river twice; he directs our attention not to the flow of water but to the river itself, the unchanging universal. (Nakamura 1996)

All subsequent quotations about time in India are from Nakamura.

Indeed, classical Indian languages also apparently do not distinguish between “to be” and “to become”: that which is becoming already is—including the future. “Indian philosophers in general replace the concept of Becoming by three aspects of temporal existence: Appearance, Extinction, and Continuance.” In modern Hindustani, “the adverb kal means both ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’; parson means ‘the day after tomorrow’ as well as ‘the day before yesterday’; atarson means equally ‘three days ago’ or ‘three days from now.”

“Indian books of history . . . are tinged with a fantastic and legendary color. They are not products of historical science but rather works of art.” On the contrary, the situation in China is quite different. “The Chinese derive their rules of social conduct from the examples of their ancestors as set down in their books of history.”

Indeed, as Joseph Needham put it, “the philosophia perennis of Chinese culture was an organic naturalism which invariably accepted the reality and importance of time” (emphasis in original). “Subjective conceptions of time were therefore uncharacteristic of Chinese thought” (Needham 1996; all further quotations about time in China here come from Needham). But discussions of time were not wholly absent, and they often were arguments along the same lines. I have just described from Heraclitus to Kant and between the kalas and the falasifa—often occurring in China at approximately the same time or perhaps ahead of when they were occurring in Greece, though presumably in total ignorance of each other. Particularly noteworthy are the arguments made by Mo Ti (479–381 BCE) and his followers, the Mohists.

The ancient Confucian school, occupied always with human affairs, was of course not interested in all these speculations, and even disapproved of them.

It is quite characteristic, in view of Chinese realism about time, that China should have possessed perhaps the greatest of all ancient historical traditions. One can say without hesitation that the Chinese were the most historically minded of all ancient peoples . . .

. . . [T]he culture of China manifested a very sensitive consciousness of time. The Chinese did not live in a timeless dream, fixed in meditation upon the noumenal world. On the contrary, history was for them perhaps more real and vital than for any other comparably ancient people; and whether they conceived time to contain a perennial fall from ancient perfection, or to pass on in cycles of glory and catastrophe, or to testify to a slow but inevitable evolution and progress, time for them brought real and fundamental change.

What is true about China concerning time is even more the case in Japan. Nakamura (1996) says that

the Japanese reaction is rather to accept, even to welcome, the fluidity and impermanence of the phenomenal world . . . This way of thinking, far from positing a changeless Absolute, regards the phenomenal world itself as the Absolute, and explicitly rejects the recognition of any ultimate reality beyond it or above it.

Most of the Buddhist sects in Japan accept a commonsense notion of time as well. For example, Shiran, in the thirteenth century CE, taught that “The Pure Land” (Jodo) is not a “place” to go to, like the Christian heaven. It is not a destination far away or something accessible only after death. The Pure Land is simply the everyday world around us, properly understood.

Contemporary Views of Time

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) is the person most frequently cited as having the last word on time.

In his theory of special relativity in 1905, Einstein concluded that the speed of light in a vacuum is uniform everywhere, but that time is measured relative to the motion of the observer: a fast-moving observer measures time slower than a stationary one. Events that are experienced at one time for one observer might occur at different times for other observers. Time might be absolute, but our perception of it is relative.

In his general theory of relativity, 1915, Einstein demonstrated that space and time are not distinct but together as “space–time,” a malleable four-dimensional continuum. Heavy objects could slow time down, and it should be possible to stop time—just as light has recently been stopped (Heinze et al. 2013). Moreover, as with Newton, Einstein’s time was not unidirectional. It could be reversed.

However, the second law of thermodynamics, which states that heat flows from hot things to cold ones, and not the other way around, suggests that time’s arrow is real. According to that law, systems become more disordered as time passes: they start out orderly and become chaotic. Such is the fate of the world: the heat death of the universe. To the contrary, other physicists point out that in fact there is no evidence that, since the Big Bang, the second law of thermodynamics works as stated here. The cosmos is not getting simpler and simpler. To the contrary, the famous physicist Freeman Dyson (2016) states,

both in the world of astronomy and in the world of biology, we see evolution moving in the opposite direction, from disorder to order, from death to life. Everywhere we see new and intricately ordered structures arising out of primeval chaos.

Dyson (2016) cites the work of the Chinese physicist, Fang Lizhi: “He explains the paradox of order and disorder as a consequence of the peculiar behavior of gravity. Unlike other kinds of energy, gravitational energy is predominantly negative.”

In the universe as a whole, gravitational energy is always dominant, and so the heat death never happens. Order grows out of chaos because we live in a universe with structures dominated by gravity. The dismal images of doom and gloom associated with the heat death turn out to be illusory. (Dyson 2016)

Different points of view about time were analyzed in an essay titled “The Unreality of Time,” by J. M. E. McTaggart (1908). He distinguished between A-series theories and B-series theories of time. A-series are versions of the commonsense notion that time is real; that change is normal and ongoing; that time flows in one direction; that the present is now, the past is an earlier now that is not now, while the future is a now that will be but is—forever—not yet. B-series theories assert the opposite: that there is no single, objective present; that time does flow, but not only in one direction; that we can say that events are earlier than or later than other events, but because that relation never changes, while time requires change, time does not exist.

There are questions that do not fall neatly into the A and B dichotomy. Is time a property of the mind (and not of objective reality) so that time only exists when a conscious mind perceives/projects it? What is the role of perception, memory, and mind in creating/perceiving time? Is time travel possible? In “both” directions, or only one (and are there only two directions time might flow)? Is time linear, cyclical, spiral, or stochastic? What is the relation of our biological clock/circadian rhythms to “real” time? Do Series-A events derive from one universe we typically inhabit, while Series-B events come from occasional events perceived/experienced in other universes/dimensions?

Recently, Sean Carroll concluded that

one possibility is that time is fundamental, and the universe changes as time passes. The other possibility is that time is not truly fundamental, but rather emergent. Quantum mechanics describes the universe as a superposition of various classical possibilities. That’s a universe that is not evolving in time—the quantum state itself simply is, unchanging and forever. But in any one part of the state, it looks like one moment of time in a universe that is evolving . . . If there were people in that universe, at every part of the superposition they would all think that time was passing, exactly as we actually do think. That’s the sense in which time can be emergent in quantum mechanics. The whole idea of “time” is just an approximation anyway. (Carroll 2016)

Similarly, Amanda Gefter (2008) observes that “some researchers increasingly suspect that time is not a fundamental feature of nature, but rather an artefact of our perception.” “It is not reality that has a time flow, it is our very approximate knowledge of reality that has a time flow. ‘Time is the effect of our ignorance’” (Gefter 2008; see also Spinney 2015). Time may simply be a consequence of biology: we are born, age, and know we will die. We see this as the passage of time. And yet that may be an illusion too.

Time and Memory

Brain researchers have concluded that there are two different kinds of memory: semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory is information and knowledge about the world that you were taught in school, or learned from friends, family, and media. It is not something that only you personally experienced but are things widely held by others and that usually can be found as “facts” in written and other records.

Episodic memory is that of some experiences and specific events in your life—things that happened to or around you (or that you believe happened to or around you) at various points in your life.

Semantic memory appears to be located in the frontal and temporal cortexes of the brain, whereas episodic memory is first found in the hippocampus. Later, the various elements are stored in different areas of the neocortex. When recalled, the hippocampus weaves the parts into a coherent memory of sounds, smells, colors, and the like.

Episodic memories also usually become semantic memories as they become less vivid and intense. On the contrary, memories that are repeatedly “played back” may become so tightly linked that they are stored as a piece in the cortex and do not require the hippocampus to retrieve and assemble them.

One of the people who has documented these processes, Endel Tulving, also coined the term chronesthesia, or “mental time travel,” to describe the ability of humans not only to recall the past but also to imagine the future. Sean Carroll remarks,

interestingly, the tasks of “remembering yourself in a particular situation in the past” and “imagine yourself in a particular hypothetical situation in the future” are seen to engage a very similar set of subsystems in the brain. Episodic memory and imagination engage the same neural machinery. (Carroll 2016; Gleick 2016)

So What?

If futurists were to take one or all of these perspectives seriously, futures studies might be very different from what it has been and is now. This is not just a philosophical point. Getting a better understanding of what time is might impact how we do futures studies (Fitzpatrick 2004). It should enhance the utility of futures studies as well, whether to predict the future (which seems unlikely) or to shape it—which may be equally unlikely too, it may turn out.

One of the most important ways in which futures studies might be different from what it is now is in the notion of agency and free will. At the very heart of futures studies is the assumption that “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” But there is growing evidence that free will, like time, is an illusion; that we make decisions before “we” are even conscious that a decision needs to be made. This evidence challenges one of the primary rationales for futures studies as a professional (rather than just an academic) activity (Bear and Bloom 2016; Bengson et al. 2014; Deviec 2011; Gazzaniga 2011; Hossenfielder 2016; Lloyd 2013; Nahmias 2010; Shaariff and Vohs 2014; Smith 2011; Wilson 2014).

Time and the World Futures Review (WFR)

To determine how futurists today view time, and use the concept in their work, I sent out a call for papers on that subject. This issue of WFR is the first of what may be two or more issues of WFR devoted to a consideration of time and futures studies.

The first is by Johan Galtung, one of the true founders of futures studies (and peace studies). He presents—in his deeply admired parsimonious style—a brief overview of time in a way that is typical for the field since its beginning.

Roberto Poli served with me as coeditor of this issue of WFR. His well-established expertise concerning time and related issues was absolutely vital. I would not dared to have ventured to edit an issue of WFR on Time and Futures Studies without his guidance.

Sohail Inayatullah is one of the few widely recognized futurists to problematize the western view of time in several essays and a book that he and Galtung coedited many years ago. His contribution here is an update on his earlier work, along with an evaluation of the impact these views have had on the futures field.

Finally, David Staley is very well known and highly respected as a specialist on the study of ideas about time within history and the social sciences. I am very pleased to be able to include his insights in this special issue on Time and Futures Studies.

I also hope to have enough other essays on time and futures studies in hand to devote a second issue of WFR to this important subject. Your contribution would be welcomed.