Brief History

Abstract

The field of Futures Studies has been sculpted for 2500 years. Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, from ancient times, in addition to Jacques Bernoulli, Von Clausewitz and Von Moltke and many other authors have an invaluable intellectual contribution to the development of the field of Future Studies. The developments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries showed multiples authors with differential theoretical and empirical proposals, but they shared the notion of collective construction of the future and the social action as key issues in the field. However, at the present time the field of Futures Studies must introduce new epistemological and ontological elements to understand the new phenomena that should be studied. Therefore, this chapter hopes to help the reader recognize the conductive threads and milestones that have shaped and will give a new shape to the field of Future Studies.