A Philosophical Journey Into the Anthropocene: Discovering Terra Incognita

A Philosophical Journey into the Anthropocene: Discovering Terra Incognita presents the Anthropocene as more than a geological epoch, but rather it as the potential metarecit of our age and the most faithful expression of the current Zeitgeist. Insofar as the Anthropocene establishes that the human agency as technological omni-power represents a “global geophysical force” capable of altering the destiny of the Earth system, the coming of this new epoch shows that technology now embodies the subject of both history and nature. This technology achieves the status of an integral epochal phenomenon: the new environment for human life. Agostino Cera traces how the “technisches Zeitalter” (age of technology) outlined by twentieth-century philosophical thought emerged out of the Anthropocene and suggests that a more appropriate name for this planetary framework Technocene. The book develops along four basic directions: epistemological, ontological, anthropological, and ethical. It argues that the Anthropocene is something radically new, a terra incognita or an “epistemic hyperobject with a (geo-)historical barycenter,” giving rise to: 1) an unprecedented form of reification of nature (“pet-ification of nature”); 2) an unexpected version of anthropocentrism (“Aidosean Prometheanism”), and 3) an unpredictable ethical paradox (“paradox of omni-responsibility”).