Lyubov Bugaeva, St. Petersburg State Univ., and Nikolai Krementsov, Univ. of Toronto; Program committee: Konstantin Bogdanov, Moscow; Ilya Kalinin, Saint-Petersburg; Riccardo Nicolosi, München; Nikolai Poselyagin, Moscow; Patricia Simpson, Hertfordshire; Matthias Schwartz, Berlin

Venue: St. Petersburg State University
Time: 16.-18.05.2019
Proposals by: 20.10.2018

In 1901 H. G. Wells published a series of essays titled Anticipations, in which he envisioned profound influences that rapidly developing science and technology were about to exert “upon human life and thought” in the course of the unfolding century. In the follow-up Mankind in the Making, he expanded this vision by focusing specifically on the effects of anticipated scientific, technological, and social advances “upon the evolution of man.” Both Anticipations and its sequel exemplified the recent resurgence of interest in the old idea – dating as far back as Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia – of the “new man”.

Indeed, in the decades around the turn of the 2oth century scores of writers, scientists, and artists in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the US, and elsewhere produced their own visions of the “coming man”. US writer Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward (1888), French immunologist and physiologist Charles Richet’s essay Dans cent ans (1891–92), Italian psychiatrist Paolo Mantegazza’s novella L’Anno 3000 (1897), German journalist Arthur Brehmer and artist Ernst Lübbert’s compilation Die Welt in hundert Jahren (1910), and many other cultural productions considered the future development of humanity. They debated its tempos:  … read more and source (Web).