Zoltán B Simon
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 300571 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Zoltán B Simon |
| PRENOMES | Zoltán B |
| SOBRENOME | Simon |
| ASSINATURA | SIMON Z B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Bielefeld University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8763-7415 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 110 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2000 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Historical futures and the pull of the past
Disconnective futures
The article explores the exhaustion of narrative as a cognitive instrument in trying to make sense of the “disconnective futures” of the Anthropocene and runaway technological imaginaries. Having its point of departure in the organic ties between narrative form and modern historical understanding, the article’s argument begins by sketching how the modern idea of a historical process entails constant crises of uncertainty, on the one hand, and fun…
The Opening of Historical Futures
With a touch of irony, the project-closing piece of the "Historical Futures" collective research endeavor pulls together the threads of its four years of explorative work by showcasing an opening of historical futures. Against the persisting myth of the closure of the future in contemporary societies, it claims that, as long as the future remains contested by virtue of the multiplicity of historical futures that societal practices and discourses …
The Anthropocene and the Planet
Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is, in three respects, far more than a synthesis of over a decade of pioneering conceptual work aimed at making sense of the Anthropocene/planetary predicament and its implications for historical understanding. First, the book makes visible an intellectual trajectory in which Chakrabarty's conceptual struggles with the Anthropocene gradually move from the centrality of the notion of t…
Earth System Science, Anthropocene Historiography, and Three Forms of Human Agency
This programmatic essay argues that meaningful historical engagement with the Anthropocene begins with recognizing that the concept arises not only from geology but also from Earth System science (ESS), which has evolved to incorporate both physical systems and human systems in an integrated view of our planet. It makes the case that this holistic understanding alters both the science and the history of the Anthropocene by introducing a novel for…
The Role of History in an Anthropocenic Knowledge Regime
Simon ZB. The Role of History in an Anthropocenic Knowledge Regime. Public History Weekly . 2021;9
The Transformation of Historical Time
The author takes on two interrelated tasks. The first is to justify the philosophy of history as an intellectual enterprise for the modern era and one which is dedicated to finding a positive meaning in the changes that occur within humanity as it moves from the past toward the future. The viability of that enterprise has been called into question by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. The second task is to propose a new concept of histori…
Utopia without us
As the prospect of self-authored human extinction increasingly appears as a plausible scenario of human futures, a growing number of efforts aim at comprehending it as the prospect of the world without us. Patrícia Vieira convincingly shows in her essay on utopia and dystopia in the Anthropocene that utopianism has become a prominent interpretive strategy to render the possibility of human extinction meaningful. This brief reflection argues again…
Anthropocenic historical knowledge
In the form of a conversational exchange of ideas, Ewa Domańska, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm reflect on the condition and role of historical knowledge in the Anthropocene. In the conversation on the potential of ‘anthropocenic historical knowledge’ – including the limitations and use of the term – each author offers and elaborates on one main theme for discussion, on which the other two co-authors reflect: Tamm begins by posing the ques…
Transformação do Tempo Histórico
Nesse texto, defendo que, ao contrário do que dizem todos os rumores, o empreendimento da filosofia da história segue bem vivo nos dias de hoje - diria até indispensável. Isso não significa dizer, é claro, que as críticas do pós-guerra devem ser completamente desconsideradas. A questão não é como retornar a uma descreditada filosofia da história, idealizadora do conceito processual de história, dotada de direcionalidade, teleologia, sentido e sub…
Temporal comparisons
This introduction describes the main themes of the special issue on temporal comparisons. It provides the background for individual contributions by sketching the way in which evaluations are intrinsic to conceptions of historical time. Inasmuch as different configurations of the relationship between past, present and future imply temporal comparisons between 'now' and 'then', historical time is subject to evaluations that we project onto the dif…
Historical Futures
This article outlines the agenda of a collective research project that aims to explore modalities of historical futures that constitute our current historical condition. To present the collective work adequately, we have teamed up with History and Theory and initiated a long-term serial publishing experiment. In the coming years, each issue of the journal will feature contributions to this research endeavor. In our project-opening piece, we brief…
Domesticating the future through history
In the most general sense, the modern idea of history is a conceptual tool deployed in order to domesticate experienced novelty and expectations of the future. In Western modernity, the operation we usually call historicization has been nothing other than an operation of temporal domestication: the integration of experienced and expected novelty into a larger processual scheme we associate with modern historical time. Based on these theoretical c…
The Historical Event
Prelude to a New Epochality
Coda
The Epochal Event
The Entangled Human-Technological-Natural World
A Perplexing Appeal to History
Epochal Thinking and Anthropogenic Catastrophe
Historical Thinking and the Human
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 (related to human-induced climate change and planetary environmental challenges), and technological ones (including advancements in human enhanceme…
The limits of Anthropocene narratives
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 Transformation of Historical Time
Historicism and constructionism
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, do…
Two Cultures of the Posthuman Future
The posthuman has been looming large on the human horizon lately. Yet there is no shared understanding of what a posthuman future could possibly mean, and the tension between a technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity and the critical posthumanist scholarship of the humanities is growing palpable. Whereas the former harbors a novel sense of historicity signaled by the expectation of an evental change to bring about the technological post…
Historical Futures
This article outlines the agenda of a collective research project that aims to explore modalities of historical futures that constitute our current historical condition. To present the collective work adequately, we have teamed up with History and Theory and initiated a long-term serial publishing experiment. In the coming years, each issue of the journal will feature contributions to this research endeavor. In our project-opening piece, we brief…
The limits of Anthropocene narratives
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…
Why the Anthropocene has no history
This paper argues that the tendency to invoke modern historical thinking in trying to make sense of the Anthropocene amounts to an untenable, self-contradictory, and self-defeating enterprise. There is a fundamental contradiction between the prospect of unprecedented change as entailed by the Anthropocene and the deep continuity of a processual historical change. On the one hand, conceiving the Anthropocene as the prospect of the unprecedented cr…
History manifested
An essential element usually passes unnoticed in recent discussion about how history as an academic discipline is supposed to be relevant for the shaping of our public life. It is the concept of history itself (history as both the course of events and historical writing) that underlies the whole discussion, which also configures the two currently most influential and fashionable efforts to reinstate the public relevance of history: The History Ma…
Temporal comparisons
This introduction describes the main themes of the special issue on temporal comparisons. It provides the background for individual contributions by sketching the way in which evaluations are intrinsic to conceptions of historical time. Inasmuch as different configurations of the relationship between past, present and future imply temporal comparisons between 'now' and 'then', historical time is subject to evaluations that we project onto the dif…
Domesticating the future through history
In the most general sense, the modern idea of history is a conceptual tool deployed in order to domesticate experienced novelty and expectations of the future. In Western modernity, the operation we usually call historicization has been nothing other than an operation of temporal domestication: the integration of experienced and expected novelty into a larger processual scheme we associate with modern historical time. Based on these theoretical c…
The story of humanity and the challenge of posthumanity
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 posthum…
Anthropocenic historical knowledge
In the form of a conversational exchange of ideas, Ewa Domańska, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm reflect on the condition and role of historical knowledge in the Anthropocene. In the conversation on the potential of ‘anthropocenic historical knowledge’ – including the limitations and use of the term – each author offers and elaborates on one main theme for discussion, on which the other two co-authors reflect: Tamm begins by posing the ques…
Historical Thinking and the Human
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 (related to human-induced climate change and planetary environmental challenges), and technological ones (including advancements in human enhanceme…
Introduction
In this introductory essay we briefly discuss three issues. First, we take stock of and pay tribute to the main achievements of narrativism, on the one hand. On the other hand, we also note its weariness as a scholarly project and argue that the philosophy of history is gradually moving toward a broadly understood postnarrativist stage and a period of renewed theoretical innovation. Next, as a part of this shift, we briefly introduce the forum co…
Earth System Science, Anthropocene Historiography, and Three Forms of Human Agency
This programmatic essay argues that meaningful historical engagement with the Anthropocene begins with recognizing that the concept arises not only from geology but also from Earth System science (ESS), which has evolved to incorporate both physical systems and human systems in an integrated view of our planet. It makes the case that this holistic understanding alters both the science and the history of the Anthropocene by introducing a novel for…
Transformação do Tempo Histórico
Nesse texto, defendo que, ao contrário do que dizem todos os rumores, o empreendimento da filosofia da história segue bem vivo nos dias de hoje - diria até indispensável. Isso não significa dizer, é claro, que as críticas do pós-guerra devem ser completamente desconsideradas. A questão não é como retornar a uma descreditada filosofia da história, idealizadora do conceito processual de história, dotada de direcionalidade, teleologia, sentido e sub…
Historicism and constructionism
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, do…
We are history
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 bet…
(The impossibility of) acting upon a story that we can believe
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 …
Two Cultures of the Posthuman Future
The posthuman has been looming large on the human horizon lately. Yet there is no shared understanding of what a posthuman future could possibly mean, and the tension between a technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity and the critical posthumanist scholarship of the humanities is growing palpable. Whereas the former harbors a novel sense of historicity signaled by the expectation of an evental change to bring about the technological post…
Do Theorists of History Have a Theory of History? Reflections on a Non-Discipline
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 stud…
The Expression of Historical Experience
The theory and philosophy of history (just like philosophy in general) has established a dogmatic dilemma regarding the issue of language and experience: either you have an immediate experience separated from language, or you have language without any experiential basis. In other words, either you have an immediate experience that is and must remain mute and ineffable, or you have language and linguistic conceptualization that precedes experience…
History set into motion again
It is believed to be common knowledge that history (in the sense of things done, in the sense of a collective singular) is suspended, that history is doomed to remain motionless. What is more, we all – or at least many of us – tend to believe that this precisely is how it should be: history, if such thing exists at all, has to stand still. It is against this backdrop that I wish to point out that there is a cultural phenomenon we should not leave…
Keserű Aranykor Calpurnius Siculus Eklogái
EKLOGÁI 1. Iulius Caesar Scaliger élménybeszámolója ("... laxus enim et tumidus est.Is tamen, cum versus saepe fundat non contemnendos, permittit me legentem dormitare; nusquam acuit, nusquam tenet, aveoque frequenter absolvere quae vixdum occoepi videre ." 1 ) egy hajdan nagyra értékelt költô poeta minorrá való lefokozódásának ke zdeteit jelzi.Calpurnius Siculus nemcsak a késôókor és a középkor századaiban számított ismert és sokat utánzott auct…
Frange, Puer, Calamos ... Bukolische allegorie, Panegyrik und die Krise des Dichterberufs in der Vierten Ekloge Des T. Calpurnius Siculus
The allegorical conception of the bucolic genre that became general in Nero’s time led to a simplification compared to Vergil’s complex art of creating symbols. Calpurnius overcame the limits of a mere reproductive imitation exactly by making use of the possibilities of pastoral allegory; in Corydon’s figure he painted a bitterly self ironic picture of his own efforts to establish himself, of the controversies of patronage and the miserable situa…
A Fasti-kutatás új irányai
Experience as the Invisible Drive of Historical Writing
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 i…
History set into motion again
It is believed to be common knowledge that history (in the sense of things done, in the sense of a collective singular) is suspended, that history is doomed to remain motionless. What is more, we all – or at least many of us – tend to believe that this precisely is how it should be: history, if such thing exists at all, has to stand still. It is against this backdrop that I wish to point out that there is a cultural phenomenon we should not leave…
History manifested
An essential element usually passes unnoticed in recent discussion about how history as an academic discipline is supposed to be relevant for the shaping of our public life. It is the concept of history itself (history as both the course of events and historical writing) that underlies the whole discussion, which also configures the two currently most influential and fashionable efforts to reinstate the public relevance of history: The History Ma…
Microhistory
The most adequate book-length account on microhistory, I believe, would be a microhistory of microhistory. Nevertheless, there is a strong chance that it could not qualify as the best available one. While such an adequate account would certainly possess the merit of being self-explanatory, at the same time it would rather automatically reproduce its own possible shortcomings. On the other hand, other accounts might register these shortcomings, bu…
Introduction
In this introductory essay we briefly discuss three issues. First, we take stock of and pay tribute to the main achievements of narrativism, on the one hand. On the other hand, we also note its weariness as a scholarly project and argue that the philosophy of history is gradually moving toward a broadly understood postnarrativist stage and a period of renewed theoretical innovation. Next, as a part of this shift, we briefly introduce the forum co…
The Expression of Historical Experience
The theory and philosophy of history (just like philosophy in general) has established a dogmatic dilemma regarding the issue of language and experience: either you have an immediate experience separated from language, or you have language without any experiential basis. In other words, either you have an immediate experience that is and must remain mute and ineffable, or you have language and linguistic conceptualization that precedes experience…
We are history
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 bet…
Why the Anthropocene has no history
This paper argues that the tendency to invoke modern historical thinking in trying to make sense of the Anthropocene amounts to an untenable, self-contradictory, and self-defeating enterprise. There is a fundamental contradiction between the prospect of unprecedented change as entailed by the Anthropocene and the deep continuity of a processual historical change. On the one hand, conceiving the Anthropocene as the prospect of the unprecedented cr…
(The impossibility of) acting upon a story that we can believe
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 …
The story of humanity and the challenge of posthumanity
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 posthum…
The Transformation of Historical Time
Historicism and constructionism
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, do…
Two Cultures of the Posthuman Future
The posthuman has been looming large on the human horizon lately. Yet there is no shared understanding of what a posthuman future could possibly mean, and the tension between a technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity and the critical posthumanist scholarship of the humanities is growing palpable. Whereas the former harbors a novel sense of historicity signaled by the expectation of an evental change to bring about the technological post…
Do Theorists of History Have a Theory of History? Reflections on a Non-Discipline
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 stud…
The Historical Event
Prelude to a New Epochality
Coda
The Epochal Event
The Entangled Human-Technological-Natural World
A Perplexing Appeal to History
Epochal Thinking and Anthropogenic Catastrophe
Historical Thinking and the Human
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 (related to human-induced climate change and planetary environmental challenges), and technological ones (including advancements in human enhanceme…
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