•  1049
    The Limits of Anthropocene Narratives
    European Journal of Social Theory 23 (2): 184-199. 2020.
    The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene predicament is best made sense of by narrative means. Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how t…Read more
  •  823
    The story of humanity and the challenge of posthumanity
    History of the Human Sciences 32 (2). 2019.
    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…Read more
  •  770
    In times of a felt need to justify the value of the humanities, the need to revisit and re-establish the public relevance of the discipline of history cannot come as a surprise. On the following pages I will argue that this need is unappeasable by scholarly proposals. The much desired revitalization of historical writing lies instead in reconciling ourselves with the dual meaning of the word history, in exploring the necessary interconnection between history understood as the course of events an…Read more
  •  504
    Our understanding of ourselves and the world as historical has drastically changed since the postwar period, yet this emerging historical sensibility has not been appropriately explained in a coherent theory of history. In this book, Zoltán Simon argues that instead of seeing the past, the present and the future together on a temporal continuum as history, we now expect unprecedented change to happen in the future and we look at the past by assuming that such changes have already happened. This …Read more
  •  487
    (The Impossibility of) Acting upon a Story That We Can Believe
    Rethinking History 22 (1): 105-125. 2018.
    The historical sensibility of Western modernity is best captured by the phrase “acting upon a story that we can believe.” Whereas the most famous stories of historians facilitated nation-building processes, philosophers of history told the largest possible story to act upon: history itself. When the rise of an overwhelming postwar skepticism about the modern idea of history discredited the entire enterprise, the historical sensibility of “acting upon a story that we can believe” fell apart to it…Read more
  •  297
    History Begins in the Future: On Historical Sensibility in the Age of Technology
    In Stefan Helgesson & Jayne Svenungsson (eds.), The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility, Berghahn Books. pp. 192-209. 2018.
    The humanities and the social sciences have been hostile to future visions in the postwar period. The most famous victim of their hostility was the enterprise of classical philosophy of history, condemned to illegitimacy precisely because of its fundamental engagement with the future. Contrary to this attitude, in this essay I argue that there is no history (neither in the sense of the course of human affairs nor in the sense of historical writing) without having a future vision in the first pla…Read more
  •  244
    This brief article is a discussion-starter on the question of the role and use of theories and philosophies of history. In the last few decades, theories of history typically intended to transform the practice of historical studies through a straightforward application of their insights. Contrary to this, I argue that they either bring about particular historiographical innovations in terms of methodology but leave the entirety of historical studies intact, or change the way we think about the e…Read more
  •  24
    Experience as the Invisible Drive of Historical Writing
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 7 (2): 183-204. 2013.
    From time to time our tiny intellectual worlds are simultaneously shaken by big ideas – ideas that, however big they are, have their expiration-date. Such is the case with the idea of the impossibility to find life outside language. In this essay, I picture what I think is the current state of the philosophy of history after the so-called linguistic turn and what I think the direction is where the philosophy of history might be headed by taking into account the important job done by linguistic t…Read more
  •  12
    Historical Thinking and the Human: Introduction
    with Marek Tamm
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 14 (3): 285-309. 2020.
    In recent years the age-old question “what is the human?” has acquired a new acuteness and novel dimensions. In introducing the special issue on “Historical Thinking and the Human”, this article argues that there are two main trends behind the contemporary “crisis of human”: ecological transformations, and technological ones. After discussing the respective anthropocenic and technoscientific redefinitions of the human, the paper theorizes three elements in an emerging new historicity of the huma…Read more
  •  12
    Historicism and constructionism: rival ideas of historical change
    History of European Ideas 45 (8): 1171-1190. 2019.
    A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births, both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and ov…Read more
  •  3
    Simon ZB, Narita FZ. Runaway Futures, Technology, and the Collapse of Understanding in Times of Unprecedented Change: An Interview with Zoltán Boldizsár Simon. _Transições_. 2020;1:26-38.