Dr. Rafael Ziegler is Associate Professor of Management at HEC Montréal and director of the Alphonse and Dorimène Desjardins International Institute for Cooperatives. His work lies at the intersection of environmental philosophy, sustainability science, and innovation studies, with a particular focus on social innovation. In 2022, his teaching on sustainability was recognized with the "Pédagogies pour une société durable" award at the Trophées Francophones des Campus Responsables. His publications include Creating Economic Space for Social Innovation (2019, with Alex Nicholls) and Innovation, Ethics and Our Common Futures (2020). Ziegler also serves as associate editor of the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities and the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship.

His talk in the PRISM Talk Series – Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries on Society and Mind addresses the renewed interest in "future making." It illustrates this interest with current examples of the uses of foresight and "backcasting" – a method that reasons backward from envisioned futures to possible pathways for achieving desirable outcomes – in research on sustainability transitions. While these discussions often refer to Immanuel Kant, his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is usually not in focus. The talk seeks to fill this gap by sketching the contours of Kantian foresight in this work. It characterizes Kantian future making as "consolatory foresight," a philosophical version of "backcasting" avant la lettre that is critical of conceiving foresight as mere empirical anticipation. The talk closes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of this philosophical approach to foresight in research and education.