MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | ’COMPARISON’ AS A MODE OF INQUIRY IN THE POST-COMPARATIVE WORLD

Anthropocene: A New History

FEBRUARY 1 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

In this presentation, I intend to interrogate the notion of "Anthropocene" as a specific temporal determination situated at the border of nature and history. The Anthropocene is both a geological era and a historical moment. Clearly, such a phenomenon requires a new concept of history, in which nature plays a central role, and ceases to be the eternal recurrence of the identical to become a genuine source of events. A phenomenon like global warming can thus be analyzed as a historical turn of nature. New notions like deep history, negative universal history, neurohistory, are currently be used by historians, theoreticians of environment, and evolutionary biologists. I will propose a philosophical approach to these new determinations.