Perhaps everything changes in the nature of our philosophical questions, in the nature of the aims and ends that might animate us, when the future dies.  We need not think this extinction of the future in terms of Brassier’s crushing thought of the extinction of the universe due to heat death as the outcome of the second law of thermodynamics, for with the anthropocene the extinction of the future is here in the form of climate change and the collapse that it will bring.  Heidegger taught us that we are ek-static, that we form ourselves by projecting ourselves into a future.  The present is presenting arising from this projection before ourselves where we find ourselves now by anticipating ourselves.  Yet what happens to this ekstasis when the future becomes extinct or foreclosed?

Hitherto all philosophy has unfolded under a premise so close to us, so proximal, that it didn’t even…