The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds

by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030478056
Publisher:	Palgrave Pivot
Publication date:	07/23/2020
Series:	Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	466 KB

About the Author

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is assistant professor at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and research fellow at Bielefeld University, Germany

Table of Contents

1. A Prelude to the Age of the Epochal.- 2. A Perplexing Appeal to History.- 3. The Entangled Human-Technological-Natural World.- 4. Epochal Thinking in the Shadow of Anthropogenic Catastrophe.- 5. Historical Event: A Narrow Category.- 6. The Epochal Event.- Conclusion.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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)