The Story of Big History

Hesketh, Ian

doi:10.5406/historypresent.4.2.0171

Cited by 37 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…And Seeley's solution, namely the construction of a developmental grand history informed by the findings of modern science, anticipates more recent trends in popular science that seek to replace the putative function of religion with unifying cosmic narratives of epic proportions. 78 This also suggests that perhaps the discipline of history played a more prominent role in debates concerning science and religion in the late nineteenth century than has typically been recognized.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

John Robert Seeley, Natural Religion, and the Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion

Hesketh¹

2018

Journal of the History of Ideas

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This essay examines the publishing and reception of J. R. Seeley's Natural Religion (1882), a book that sought to bring about a reconciliation between science and religion. While Natural Religion has long been overlooked, it is argued that its reception gives us insight into changing views about the relationship between science and religion in the late Victorian period. The essay also explores how the reception of the book was conditioned by its bibliographic lineage as it was signed not by Seeley, but "by the Author of Ecce Homo."

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

John Robert Seeley, Natural Religion, and the Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion

Hesketh¹

2018

Journal of the History of Ideas

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“…The collective endeavor indicated by this question includes issues regarding what form a new cosmic story would take, what medium it would be recorded in, how changeable it would be, who would tell it, who would be its audience(s), how its multiple versions would coexist, and how it would relate to other coexisting and antecedent cosmic stories, among many additional concerns. Other scholars have begun to write about these challenges (Hesketh, 2014; Sideris, 2017; Zakariya, 2017).…”

Section: Part Iii: Narrativity In the New Timescapementioning

confidence: 99%

Deep time and compressed time in the Anthropocene: The new timescape and the value of cosmic storytelling

Shoshitaishvili

2020

The Anthropocene Review

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The scientific discovery of our universe’s immense cosmological history and Earth’s vast geologic history has radically altered common perceptions of time, prompting us to think in terms of millions and billions of years rather than hundreds and thousands. Meanwhile human societies impact the Earth System at accelerating rates and more comprehensively than ever before, leading scientists to propose the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. These two contrasting temporal transformations have mostly been considered separately: the expanding awareness of cosmological and geologic duration, on the one hand, and the acute sense of swift technological change, on the other. However, their contrast and coexistence are important to recognize. The challenge of understanding the Anthropocene’s complex timescales is partly due to the inability of human institutions to reconcile this twofold disruption whereby time has both expanded (into deep time) and compressed (in techno-social acceleration). After theorizing this transformation, I evaluate the current cosmic stories helping human beings reconceptualize the new timescape.

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“…Today, a big data approach to history aims at recasting human history as a ‘better version of large and small contours in the overall story’, which does not mean ‘a straightforward tale of progress, but a set of overlapping stories’ (Manning, 2013: 23). At the same time, big history tells the evolutionary epic in which humanity features as a part of the ‘history’ of practically everything since the birth of the universe (see the analysis of Hesketh, 2014). Finally, disguised with the rather suspicious label of ‘historical prediction’, the popular history of humanity by Harari (2017) tells the story of humanity becoming gods in posthumanity through a conventionally sketched developmental historical process.…”

Section: How To Conceive Of the Better-than-human?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The story of humanity and the challenge of posthumanity

Simon

2018

History of the Human Sciences

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Today’s technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity simultaneously evokes and defies historical understanding. On the one hand, it implies a historical claim of an epochal transformation concerning posthumanity as a new era. On the other, by postulating the birth of a novel, better-than-human subject for this new era, it eliminates the human subject of modern Western historical understanding. In this article, I attempt to understand posthumanity as measured against the story of humanity as the story of history itself. I examine the fate of humanity as the central subject of history in three consecutive steps: first, by exploring how classical philosophies of history achieved the integrity of the greatest historical narrative of history itself through the very invention of humanity as its subject; second, by recounting how this central subject came under heavy criticism by postcolonial and gender studies in the last half-century, targeting the universalism of the story of humanity as the greatest historical narrative of history; and third, by conceptualizing the challenge of posthumanity against both the story of humanity and its criticism. Whereas criticism fragmented history but retained the possibility of smaller-scale narratives, posthumanity does not doubt the feasibility of the story of humanity. Instead, it necessarily invokes humanity, if only in order to be able to claim its supersession by a better-than-human subject. In that, it represents a fundamental challenge to the modern Western historical condition and the very possibility of historical narratives – small-scale or large-scale, fragmented or universal.

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The Story of Big History

Cited by 37 publications

References 9 publications

John Robert Seeley, Natural Religion, and the Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion

John Robert Seeley, Natural Religion, and the Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion

Deep time and compressed time in the Anthropocene: The new timescape and the value of cosmic storytelling

The story of humanity and the challenge of posthumanity

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