If humankind now rivals the great forces of nature in its impact on the Earth system — so that the history of the Earth and the history of humans have converged — the Enlightenment foundations of the social sciences and humanities are called into question. The conception of the natural world on which sociology, political science, history, law, economics and philosophy rest — that of an inert backdrop to the drama of human affairs — is increasingly difficult to defend. And in an epoch in which « Gaia » has been reawakened, the « social-only » conceptions of autonomy, agency, freedom and reflexivity that define modernity, and the idea of the human on which these disciplines have been constructed, must be rethought.

This conference is designed to begin the rethinking of the social sciences and humanities demanded by the arrival of the new geological epoch, the « Age of Humans ». It will attempt to open new vistas by drawing together scholars with an intuition that something fundamental has shifted.