Facing Earth: Introduction to Planetary Humanities

We call the earth our home, but do we ever really turn to ‘face’ it? This course explores questions around what the earth is, our relation to the earth, and how earth has been discussed in philosophy, history, and science. The goal of the course is an interdisciplinary investigation into the earth and closely associated concepts such as planet, world, and globe. Exploring earth in an interdisciplinary manner constitutes planetary humanities: a field that studies connections between humans and planet earth. The course engages with diverse areas such as phenomenology, ontology, astronomy, philology, Earth System Science, and the Gaia hypothesis. The course encourages students to think creatively about the earth and emphasizes understanding how the earth has been conceptualized in philosophy, history, and science before and after the Copernican revolution.

The course starts with an overview of key terms: earth, planet, world, and globe. Each of these terms recur throughout the course in the readings, discussion, and assignments. The course begins by placing discussions about the earth in the context of the first pictures of earth taken from the moon. It then explores the breakdown of disciplinary boundaries between the natural and human sciences assumed by planetary humanities. The course then discusses the possibility of different types of earth (phenomenological versus stellar). And it examines the scientific ways in which the roundness of the globe has been measured and imagined how the category of earth was incorporated into Indian ontological theories. The course then addresses the imaginative and scientific significance of the earth as simply another planet that also moves, rather than conceptualized as the unmoving center of the solar system. We then explore the Gaia hypothesis and attempt to draw a finer distinction between earth and planet and our relation to the earth—our only home in the universe.

David Shulman, “Empirical Observation and Embodied Nature in Sixteenth-century South India,” in What Reason Promises: Essays on Reason, Nature and History edited by Wendy Doniger, Peter Galison, and Susan Neiman (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 142-152.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Four Theses,” The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021), pp. 23-48.

Erle C. Ellis, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Glenn A. Albrecht, “Introduction,” in Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Ithaca, 2019), pp. 1-11.

Glenn A. Albrecht, “Glossary of Psychoterratic Terms,” in Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Ithaca, 2019), pp. 199-201.

John K. Wright, “Terrae Incognitae: The Place of the Imagination in Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 37, no. 1 (1947), pp. 1-15.

Tim Lenton, Earth System Science: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016).

Thomas Nail, Theory of the Earth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021). (Only introduction provided)