Re-Founding History as Big History

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Re-Founding History as Big History

This episode is a presentation that I gave to an online big history meeting, with a few changes made. The theme of the conference was “A New Big History: theory, methods, objects & perspectives,” and I attempted to follow the template of the meeting organizers as closely as I could.

The earliest domains of human knowledge, which include history, were founded in a context in which the sciences were unformed and inchoate. Mathematics and cosmology, also among the earliest disciplines, have been repeatedly transformed by conceptual revolutions in their foundations. History as a discipline, however, has not experienced any revolution in its foundations comparable to the foundational transformations of the natural sciences since the scientific revolution, or even the social sciences since the twentieth century. History, then, is ripe for a re-founding that would set the discipline on new foundations. This re-founding of history would constitute a Copernican displacement in which historical knowledge previously understood to be central is displaced to the periphery of knowledge and the heretofore unknown periphery comes into focus as the normative basis of history. This results in changes both to the traditional conception of history and the implicit conception of history in big history. Big history has been understood as a multidisciplinary effort, but the re-founding of history as big history (which should properly be understood as history simpliciter) means its conception as a multidisciplinary science is replaced by a univocal science with a theoretical foundation adequate to the indefinite expansion of historical knowledge.

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#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory #BigHistory #interdisciplinarity #univocal #astrobiology #macrohistory #time #proto-naturalistic #MethodologicalNaturalism #ScientificRevolution