Overview
- Brings the Anthropocene debate in dialogue with historical thinking
- Uses a transdisciplinary approach, bridging the humanities and natural sciences
- Appeals to scholars and students from a wide range of disciplines, including history, philosophy, environmental humanities, anthropology, cultural studies, political theory, and the life sciences
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology (PSHST)
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About this book
This book is a unique attempt to capture the growing societal experience of living in an age unlike anything the world has ever seen. Fueled by the perception of acquiring unprecedented powers through technologies that entangle the human and the natural worlds, human beings have become agents of a new kind of transformative event. The ongoing sixth mass extinction of species, the prospect of a technological singularity, and the potential crossing of planetary boundaries are expected to trigger transformations on a planetary scale that we deem catastrophic and try to avoid. In making sense of these prospects, Simon’s book sketches the rise of a new epochal thinking, introduces the epochal event as an emerging category of a renewed historical thought, and makes the case for the necessity of bringing together the work of the human and the natural sciences in developing knowledge of a more-than-human world.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
Reviews
“Zoltán Simon continues his quest to develop an understanding of our predicament of anthropogenic-technological transformations that is both untimely and timely, in the best Nietzschean sense – both radically different from existing theories and exactly what we need in the present moment. In The Epochal Event, he offers us a tool to engage meaningfully and critically with the effects of human planetary-scale agency, and points out a new direction for historical thinking to contribute to the omni-disciplinary endeavor to save the planet and our futures.” (Helge Jordheim, Professor in Cultural History and Museology, University of Oslo, Norway)
“This book offers much needed conceptual orientation about our current situation, the complexity of which we haven’t understood yet. It makes us see how contemporary historiography can approach the affordances of our time in their intricate entanglement. If one wants to get a sense for the epochal significance of the Anthropocene-thesis in its ontological and political bearings, here is a well-argued statement.” (Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Professor MSO in Philosophy, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is assistant professor at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and research fellow at Bielefeld University, Germany
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Epochal Event
Book Subtitle: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds
Authors: Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47805-6
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-47804-9Published: 24 July 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-47807-0Published: 25 July 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-47805-6Published: 23 July 2020
Series ISSN: 2730-972X
Series E-ISSN: 2730-9738
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 143
Topics: Historiography and Method, History of Science, History of Technology, Environment Studies