The introduction of the long-term history of the Earth into the preoccupations of historians has triggered a crisis because it has become impossible to keep the “planet” as one single entity outside of history properly understood. As soon as the planetary intruded into history, it became impossible to keep it as one naturalized background. By problematizing the planetary, Dipesh Chakrabarty has forced philosophers, historians and anthropologists to extend pluralism to the very ground on which history was supposed to unfold. Hence Bruno Latour’s attempt at counting the number of “planets” whose attractions are simultaneously being felt today on any political question. Each of his eight planets are defined by the disconnect between where they are situated and where they are imagined to be moving, which means that each planet is led by a different and incommensurable philosophy of history. Such a “fictional planetology” is then discussed by Chakrabarty, who reviews the difficulties historians have had in taking the nonhuman (and hence the planet) as a historical agent and then adds to Latour’s count a new planetary body which further complicates the geopolitical situation. The result of their joint effort is to shift questions of philosophy of history to philosophy of geography.

将地球的长期历史引入历史学家的视野，引发了一场危机，因为要使“行星”成为不可能被正确理解的历史之外的一个实体，已经成为不可能。行星一旦进入历史，就不可能将其保留为自然归化的背景。通过使行星问题化，Dipesh Chakrabarty迫使哲学家，历史学家和人类学家将多元论扩展到了应该发展历史的地步。因此布鲁诺·拉图尔（Bruno Latour）尝试数数今天在任何政治问题上同时引起人们注意的“行星”的数量。他的八个行星中的每一个都由它们所处的位置与想象中的运动之间的不连续性来定义，这意味着每个行星都受到一种不同且不可估量的历史哲学的领导。查克拉巴蒂（Chakrabarty）随后讨论了这种“虚构的行星学”，他回顾了历史学家在将非人类（因此也就是地球）作为历史动因时遇到的困难，然后在拉图尔（Latour）的视野中增加了一个新的行星体，这进一步使地缘政治局势更加复杂。他们共同努力的结果是将历史哲学问题转向地理哲学。