Abstract
I will approach the conference topic from the point of view of an American philosopher Arthur C. Danto.
Somebody might object that Danto belongs to the prominent Western thinkers, and therefore his theory does not contribute to the demarginalization of the future. As a white man belonging to the upper class, he found himself in a privileged position.
However, his philosophy can help us to reveal the reasons why are some (mostly artistic) accounts of future marginalized. My thesis is that the ignorance of representations of the future stemming from marginalized political and societal groups results from their marginalization in our present society.
Although Danto is known mostly as a philosopher of art, he paid systematic attention to the problems of the philosophy of history. In his Analytical Philosophy of History and Narration and Knowledge, he introduced the notion of narrative, i.e., a story used by a historian to explain past events and argue that the future forms an integral part of the past.
Thus, historical understanding has a retrospective character in that the meaning of a historical event changes in the light of future happening. Later in his career, Danto touch upon the problem of artistic representation of the future, especially in his essay The End of Art.
In this essay, he claimed that our depiction of the world's future state says about our present but not about the future itself. In my presentation, I will put these two streams of Danto's thought together to prove my thesis.
In the first part, I will explain Danto's notion of narrative originating in his philosophy of history and his position concerning the future. In the second part of my paper, I will pay attention to his interpretation of art representing the future.
Following Danto's sketches in his texts on the end of art, I aim to demonstrate what do our visions of the future reveal about our present, i.e., our society's current state. t. In doing so, I will consider Wittgenstein's notion of forms of life adopted by Danto and Danto's idea that art functions as a mirror reflecting our society's state and conventions discussed in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
Following these thoughts, I will demonstrate that the neglect of representations of the future made by people from marginalized groups is closely related to the ignorance of these groups in our society. I believe that these groups' ignorance has become a philosophical discussion topic because the culture itself started to be more and more aware that the voice of the marginalized has to be heard.