Ours Is the Earth: Science and Human History in the Anthropocene

IF 0.4 3区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY
S. Jasanoff
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

History at one time drew unproblematically on records produced by human societies about themselves and their doings. Advances in biology and the earth sciences introduced new narrative resources that repositioned the human story in relation to the evolution of all else on the planet, thereby decentering earlier conceptions of time, life, and human agency. This essay reflects on what it means for our understanding of the human that the history of our species has become so intimately entangled with the material processes that make up the biosphere, while concurrently the temporal horizon of our imagination has been stretched forward and back, underscoring the brevity of human existence in relation to earthly time. I suggest that, despite significant changes in the resources with which we can rethink the human condition, drawing upon the sciences, history’s fundamental purposes have not been rendered irrelevant. These center, as before, on the normative project of connecting past and future in ways that make sense of human experience and give meaning to it. In particular, the question of how humans should imagine the stewardship of the Earth in the Anthropocene remains an ethical project for history and not primarily the domain of the natural sciences.
我们的地球:人类世的科学与人类历史
历史曾经毫无疑问地依赖于人类社会对自身及其行为所产生的记录。生物学和地球科学的进步引入了新的叙事资源,将人类的故事与地球上所有其他生物的进化重新定位,从而消除了早期关于时间、生命和人类能动性的概念。这篇文章反映了人类的历史与构成生物圈的物质过程如此紧密地纠缠在一起对我们理解人类意味着什么,同时,我们想象的时间范围已经向前和向后延伸,强调了人类存在与地球时间的短暂性。我认为,尽管我们可以利用科学来重新思考人类状况的资源发生了重大变化,但历史的基本目的并没有变得无关紧要。和之前一样,它们的中心是连接过去和未来的规范性工程,以使人类经验有意义并赋予其意义。特别是,人类应该如何想象在人类世中对地球的管理,这个问题仍然是历史上的一个伦理项目,而不是自然科学的主要领域。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
1.00
自引率
0.00%
发文量
10
期刊介绍: Philosophy of history is a rapidly expanding area. There is growing interest today in: what constitutes knowledge of the past, the ontology of past events, the relationship of language to the past, and the nature of representations of the past. These interests are distinct from – although connected with – contemporary epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. Hence we need a distinct venue in which philosophers can explore these issues. Journal of the Philosophy of History provides such a venue. Ever since neo-Kantianism, philosophy of history has been central to all of philosophy, whether or not particular philosophers recognized its potential significance.
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