How can contingency be managed through action, and how do people think about the relationship between present thought and action and their uncertain (or even believed certain) future? Historians at the University of Duisburg-Essen are dealing with the historical dimension of these highly topical questions in the DFG Research Training Group "Precaution, Foresight and Prediction: Coping with Contingency by Acting on the Future". The participating historians are thus questioning and expanding theoretical considerations that start from a principally new relationship to contingency as one of the characteristics of modernity. The novelty of the approach lies in shifting the level of analysis from conceptions of the future to the level of the active attitudes that actors adopt toward the future and to the options for action that these active attitudes make possible. They are to be studied in a cross-cultural and cross-epochal manner in order to highlight the plurality of social horizons of possibility in history. The doctoral projects will deal with the cultures of Greco-Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern period, as well as the world since the 18th century.