The Epochal Event

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.

Auteur

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

Contenu

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.