Environmental Philosophy

Volume 19, Issue 2, Fall 2022

A Planetary Imagination: Responses to Chakrabarty’s Socio-Natural Historiography

Wonder and Politics in the Anthropocene: Beyond Curiosity and Reverence

The paper starts from the wonderment-reverence distinction introduced by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. While Chakrabarty’s concept of the planetary as the framework for the Anthropocene is accepted, his skepticism about the political relevance of wonder(ment) in the Anthropocene is challenged. Pace Chakrabarty, the link between wonder(ment) and curiosity is severed, and wonder is instead defined through the connections to the faculties of listening and reflective judgment. As such, wonder can be relevant to politics in the Anthropocene when engaging with the planetary