The twenty-first century has brought about a sense of rapid global and planetary changes. Discussions of novel kinds of ecological and technological transformations have been around since the immediate post-war years, but in the last two decades they have become core issues of public debate. Today, there is a growing awareness of human-induced climate change and biodiversity loss radically transforming the Earth system, of new biotechnologies, transhumanism, and artificial intelligence research promising previously unforeseen changes that point beyond the human condition, and of the potential new dimensions all this adds to the already manifold ways in which inequalities pervade the sociopolitical sphere.

Yet the theoretical underpinnings of the potentially new historical condition underlying this wider Anthropocene predicament and the extent to which historical understanding as we know it is (un)able to cope with the novel predicament are yet to be explored. In our view, these questions constitute a part of a new agenda of a renewed philosophy of history. The overall agenda must, of course, be much wider, and the Anthropocene predicament must be understood broadly enough. Its scope should encompass not only the entangled human and natural world as it appears in the transdisciplinary Anthropocene debate but also – among others – all the freshly emerging and oftentimes intersecting approaches of critical posthumanism, environmental humanities, multispecies approaches in anthropology and archaeology, and debates on biotechnology, human enhancement, transhumanism, and artificial intelligence.

In this article, we argue for two interrelated theses: (1) philosophy of history has to broaden its scope and embrace a new concept of history; and (2) it has to be a new philosophy of history as a new knowledge formation designed to address the most pressing concerns of our own times which escape the confines of studying the human world. The first thesis implies the necessity of reconnecting the philosophy of history with historical studies in coming to terms with the emerging new notion of history. The function of societal self-understanding as ‘historical’ can be fulfilled only insofar as the two are able to discuss jointly the concerns of the changing world, and only insofar as they reinforce each other in that. The second thesis responds to the challenge implied in recent ecological and technological prospects. Whereas modern historical knowledge emerged as one of the human sciences designed to understand the simultaneously constituted human being as a subject of study, recent ecological and technological discussions extend beyond such confines in addressing the concerns of a more-than-human world – of animals, plants, machines, artificial intelligence, Earth system changes – and their relation to the human world. To be able to make sense of concerns for the more-than-human, historical knowledge as we know it might similarly have to transform beyond recognition.

In light of these considerations, we argue for a new notion of history and a new agenda for the philosophy of history. To avoid misunderstandings, we do not argue for or share all individual theoretical positions we introduce; what we argue for is a new notion of history that brings together the issues that new approaches to the more-than-human world debate. In outlining the new understanding of history appropriate for the time of the Anthropocene, we focus on its three main aspects. First, we begin by outlining the challenge of investigating a more-than-human world which will entail a multispecies history. Then we turn to themes that are more familiar in the philosophy of history: the relation between the question of scale and historical time. In doing so, secondly, we make the case for a multiscalar history that entangles timescales; and third, we argue for a non-continuous history that departs from linear, processual, and developmental configurations of historical time.