História da história: a big history e a transdisciplinaridade : o fim da fronteira entre a história e as ciências naturais

Abstract

This work discusses the possibility of making a single history, on which starts with the big bang and goes till today. Science advances in the 20th century, the greater knowledge that we have about ourselves and about the world around us, the knowledge about science itself after the modernity crisis, all this, had an impact in history research and in the way we study history. We need to rethink not only the concept of history but rethink also the new research areas that have opened to historians, namely world history and big history. Based on the discussion above, I try to answer two questions. First, can natural history be considered as history as such in the way historians use the term? Second, are natural history and the history of the historians parts of the same history, one which the historians cannot deny under the risk of giving up to non-historians the main task of historians. I also discuss the possibility of integrating human history with natural history, placing, this way, the history of our species in the context of our world, and our world in the context of the universe. Starting from the historicization of the natural sciences, I discuss the possibility of the unification of sciences based on the theory of complexity, on transdisciplinarity, and on two history areas, world history and big history. I argue that it is possible to create a single history, big history, and that it should happen within the realm of transdisciplinarity, a place, a topos, in which knowledge goes between, through, and beyond disciplines.