Purpose
Purpose of the Future Foundation
The Future Foundation is a place for foundational work.
Not for the next answer to an old question, but for the moment before it: for the question of whether we are still thinking with the right concepts at all.
For much of what is taken for granted today — in mathematics, physics, technology, society, or one’s own self-understanding — already begins with presuppositions that have become almost invisible.
This is precisely where the Future Foundation begins.
It collects, develops, and publishes texts, models, and tools that make these presuppositions visible again and thus allow them to be questioned anew.
The Tractatus Principio – On Difference belongs in this context.
It does not begin with numbers, things, space, or consciousness, but one step earlier:
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with difference.
From there it follows how relation, number, observation, language, memory, and world-description can arise at all. What usually appears as a finished thing is not simply presupposed, but led back to the distinction through which it first becomes readable as something determinate.
The Future Foundation therefore does not publish the Tractatus in order to close it.
On the contrary.
It is meant to be read, examined, developed further, and applied. As a space of thought. As a formal experiment. And as an invitation to look once more at the places where our concepts have long since become so self-evident that we no longer notice their origin.
For the future is difficult to think with concepts whose own presuppositions have become part of the problem.
Perhaps the future therefore does not begin with a new answer.
Perhaps it begins with a better distinction.
The logo
The logo of the Future Foundation takes up two central images from the Tractatus Principio.
The outer circle stands for the possibility of geometry: a closed form from which different orientations and figures can emerge.
At the center stands a Penrose triangle. It appears geometrically definite — but cannot be closed without contradiction in space. It therefore stands for the impossibility of geometry.
In the Tractatus, both belong together:
Between the two lies difference — and from this difference the whole further movement of the work begins.
Or, in short:
The circle shows what geometry can be.
The triangle shows where it reaches its limit.
Between them, the Tractatus Principio begins.