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What is life? This question resonates with renewed force in the presence of the great challenges of the time – a pandemic, the climate crisis and the changing face of the planet, the dominance of the capitalist market, and with it technologies reaching for a continuous, putative improvement of life. How is one to understand today the uniqueness of life confronted by inanimate systems? What distinguishes the organic and the manufactured, actual life and virtual reality, bare life and a life worth living? Is life a single concept, or as in Hebrew, “incorrigibly plural”?

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The aim of the issue is to propose theoretical tools for thinking the wide range of forms taken by life and, specifically, the possibilities open for new and free life forms in face of the depletion of life and ecological destruction.

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The ancient distinction between life as an essential characteristic of organisms, and life as a meaningful human becoming which needs to be cultivated – the distinction between “being alive” and “having a life” (in an active and rich sense) – forms the background to our invitation: Iyyun calls on thinkers and scholars to deepen the discussion of the links between the nature of life and the meaning of life, the right to life and the conditions for the appearance and disappearance of forms of life.

The question of the future has become acute at this time, in the shadow of the pandemic and the crises of democracy and ecology, but it is not a sense of wonder at the unknown that motivates it. The question is neither being posed from a belief in the possibility of making the world a better place to live in, nor even from anxiety about the end of times. It is being asked today out of the sense of the future being lost, an understanding that, in an era of hyper-technologized capitalism, human temporality has shrunk to a prolonged present. In the “age of algorithms” it seems that this extension of the present cannot develop into anything new or surprising; a present of this sort remains essentially familiar, predictable, manageable and solvable. Can one talk today about the future in a way which isn’t simply formal or positivist, but which renders present the concreteness of the invisible, the unexpected, the open, the utopian and dystopian, in our lives; and do so in a way which explains why such a presence is important and even necessary for the life of the present?

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The aim of this special issue is to bring the future into encounter with possibilities of philosophical conversation and articulation, extracting it from the whitewash of intellectual indifference. The abundance latent in the future calls for a development of philosophical language sensitive to what is tentative, uncertain – to the “perhaps” of the not yet. The discussion of the future is necessary for there to be a “horizon of hope” as Ernst Bloch used the term. Such a contemplative opening to the future is needed if ethical and political vision is to be communicated to coming generations.