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This paper considers how 'the possibility of possibility' as freedom of choice and audacious obligation towards newness found in philosophical works of such scholars as Søren Kierkegaard and Michel Serres is tempered by socio-historical circumstance. Ethnographic material from Scotland and Greece demonstrates contrasting ways that possibilities are impacted by the various timespaces that open or foreclose pathways to the future. Possibility shapes notions of the Self and Society since people are propelled to (in)action by way of recurring and reinterpreted pasts, are pulled through futural horizons in present-day practice or become stuck on the threshold of becoming. In the context of the independence movement in Scotland, possibility plays an active role in political life of independence campaigners with a feedback loop between past-present-future providing momentum to actualise the possible. In Greece, a decade of crisis has foreclosed previously possible futures with people feeling stuck in a repeating spin-cycle where horizons of the possible cannot be crossed. The ethnographic examples showcase how the multiplicities of human life affect the possibility of possibility and how visions of the elsewhere, elsewhen, and otherwise emerge in more or less 'positive' scenarios.

Possibility engineering is a variant of decision analysis that focuses on highlighting a robust set of acceptable courses of action that satisfy a decision maker's value constraints rather than identifying and prescribing a single, optimal course of action. A shift from a conventional decision-analytic approach to a possibility engineering approach can facilitate problem resolution by sparing decision makers from misconceptions surrounding the term "decision analysis" and freeing them from its demands for structural precision, preferential fidelity, and prescription adherence. In this work, I will develop possibility engineering as a framework for resolving problems of choice under uncertainty. This development will include motivation for adopting a possibility engineering framework, establishment of synthetic probabilities and synthetic decision trees as core framework elements, formalization of concatenation and clone operations for matrices, and ultimately establishment of the possibility matrix as the mechanism for partitioning the set of all available courses of action in a manner consistent with the decision maker's value constraints.

In the light of the centenary of the Armenian genocide and its ongoing denial, serving once again as a reminder of the inherently ethical and political implications of our work as scholars, this conference proposes to reflect on the status, roles, and registers of fact/uality, real/ity, and possibility within the framework of a productive juxtaposition of two temporal horizons: contested history and uncertain futures. The 20th century has taught us that mass violence always unfolds in and affects the dimension of thought and knowledge. Within the field of historiography the principle according to which historical findings remain open to revision can be hijacked by a 'revisionist' political programme of denial that calls the reality of events as meaningful ensembles of facts into question. It does so by suspending the process of interpretation and, paradoxically, by mobilizing a positivist conception of 'reality'. It is by pointing to a 'truth', out there, on the horizon, yet always out of reach, that any form of reality is unsettled, submitting competing possibilities to an unending play of speculation. At the same time, the speculative rehearsal of different historical scenarios has become an operative principle of the distinct genre of counterfactual history. Singular events or variables are selectively factored in and out of an imaginative analysis that actively plays with an expanded array of possibilities. Yet behind any 'as if' might lurk an 'if only', which can render service to revisionist politics. Speculation, yet again, attains an entirely different operational reality and effectiveness within the field of risk and crisis management, where possibilities are being rendered calculable, imagined and realized not in order to think utopia, but to secure a more integrated control of what could come. Whether in anticipation of natural disasters, pandemics, terrorist attacks, or economic crisis, techniques such as scenario-modelling and predictive analyses are employed in order to enhance response capacities ...

A main goal of Possibility Studies is to explore the complex cultural-political work of imagining the future(s). As this brief note argues, this task is deeply shaped at present by the narrow notions of reality, and hence of the possible, inherited from Western modernity. Becoming aware of the onto-epistemic foundations of modernity thus becomes essential for the collective journey into the reinvention of possibility.

Wisdom is an important yet seldomly discussed topic within Possibility Studies. The present issue, with a lead paper by Heinz Streib and commentaries by colleagues from across disciplines, intends to change this state of affairs. This editorial reinforces these links and argues that Self – Other relations are fundamental for wisdom and the possible alike. It focuses on the consequences of placing xenosophia and 'responsiveness to the other' at the heart of living together, in a shared society, and being able to engage in wise explorations of the possible. The urgency of recognizing the otherness within the self and others as selves is emphasized in the end and a call is launched for a deeper integration between wisdom research and Possibility Studies.

Three basic acceptations of the possible are presented: the epistemological, the ontological, and the metaphysical. The latter two are presented in some details. They could be distinguished as the processual unfolding of conditions (the ontological reading) and the vision of the process as given and fully completed within each present moment (the metaphysical reading). The ontological dimension can be further distinguished into two different unfoldings of real processes: as the horizontal (temporal) accumulation of determinations and as the vertical (through strata of reality) emergence of both higher entities and higher determinations.