Wonder’s significance is a recurrent theme in the history of philosophy. In the Theaetetus, Plato’s Socrates claims that philosophy begins in wonder (thaumazein). Aristotle echoes these sentiments in his Metaphysics; it is wonder and astonishment that first led us to philosophize. Philosophers from the Ancients through Wittgenstein discuss wonder, yet scant recent attention has been given to developing a general systematic account of emotional wonder. I develop an account of emotional wonder and defend its connection with apparent or seeming value. (...) Recently, several philosophers invoke wonder to back non-eudaimonistic value judgments. I introduce methods to incorporate these judgments into a eudaimonistic moral framework. On the analysis presented, wonder requires its object to seem valuable, but whether the object is in fact valuable remains an open question. Wonder enraptures us with objects that might be of true or merely illusory value, grounded either in our own well-being or in non-eudaimonistic value. (shrink)

In terms of intervening in embodied experience, medical treatment is wonder-full in its ambition and its metaphysical presumption; yet, wonder’s role in clinical medicine has received little philosophical attention. In this paper, I propose, to doctors and others in routine clinical life, the value of an openness to wonder and to the sense of wonder. Key to this is the identity of the central ethical challenges facing most clinicians, which is not the high-tech drama of the popular conceptions of medical (...) ethics but, rather, the routine of patients’ undramatic but unremitting demands for the clinician’s time and respectful attention. Wonder (conceived as an intense and transfiguring attentiveness) is a ubiquitous ethical source, an alternative to the more familiar respect for rational autonomy, a source of renewal galvanizing diagnostic imagination, and a timely recalling of the embodied agency of both patient and clinician. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the importance of wonder in human flourishing and is orientated towards the dynamics between the two, but with an emphasis on how the former is important for illuminating the latter. It begins with a preliminary sketch of both wonder and human flourishing and subsequently moves on to highlight three aspects of human flourishing: 1) ‘Individuality’, 2) ‘Relations’ and 3) ‘The political’, and why these play to wonderment.

The article revisits the theory of hegemony of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and shows how a normative injunction, which according to Laclau is not compatible with the hegemonic logic, is not only possible but a necessary condition for hegemony to function. The article claims that the path to demonstrate this involves rethinking the relationship between the theory of hegemony and Derridean deconstruction. Following criticisms that the theory of hegemony overlooks the aporetic nature of Derridean undecidability that it nevertheless relies (...) upon, the hegemonic logic is submitted to a deconstructive reading, which reveals an internal aporia in it. It is further argued that the unaccounted aporia in the logic of hegemony explains the theory’s inability to satisfactorily account for its essential theoretical underpinning, the radical exclusion. However, the article also demonstrates that the aporia does not destroy hegemonic logic but, instead, supplements it by a normative dimension, by a demand of opening to the other as other. (shrink)

The general topic of my philosophical dissertation is phenomenological ontology of breathing. I do not investigate the phenomenon of breathing as a natural scientific problem, but as a philosophical question. Within our tradition, breathing has been normally understood as a mechanistic-materialistic physiological life-sustaining process of gas exchange and cellular respiration which does not really seem to have any essential connection to human being’s spiritual, mental or philosophical capacities. On the contrary to this natural scientific view, I argue that breathing can (...) be understood as a philosophical question that has phenomenological, experiential, ontological, spiritual, bodily, mental, poetic, elemental, ethical, voluntary and mystical dimensions. My investigation conceptualizes breathing in the first place as a question of phenomenological ontology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenologico-ontological method of interrogation of the lived body’s experiential openness to the world and Being provides the most fundamental point of departure in this dissertation. Merleau-Ponty emphasized in his investigations the lived body’s perceptual openness to the world and Being. He argued famously for the primacy of perception. His thesis of the primacy of perception means that perception as the perceptual openness to the world and Being is the foundation which is always presupposed by all the other levels of our existence and being-in-the-world. In this dissertation, I challenge this idea of the primacy of perception with Merleau-Ponty’s own remarks about breathing. I argue that in his own remarks about breathing, he implicitly points toward a level which is even more fundamental than the primacy of perception. In this dissertation, this level of our being-in-the-world I call the primacy of breathing. Breathing as the lived body’s respiratory openness to the world and Being is now understood as the foundation which is always presupposed by all the other dimensions of our being-in-the-world. These dimensions are, for example, our theoretical, practical, social and perceptual ways of relating with the world. If the idea of the primacy of breathing is taken seriously, it means that all the questions of philosophy could be rethought, reexamined and re-experienced within the fundamental atmosphere of respiratory openness to the world and Being. In this dissertation, I initially try to rethink philosophy as a new philosophy of breathing. This new philosophy of breathing would be phenomenological ontology of breathing. The bases of this new phenomenological ontology of breathing are Merleau-Ponty’s remarks about breathing. My task is to explicate and interpret them with the help of Merleau- Ponty’s own phenomenological ontology. In my task of beginning philosophy anew as philosophy of breathing or as respiratory philosophy, I will also use the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Claudel, Luce Irigaray, Edmund Husserl and David Kleinberg-Levin. My dissertation is divided into two main sections. In Section One, I construct within the framework of phenomenological ontology a new notion of breathing as the primacy of breathing. In Section Two, I develop a phenomenological method that I call the method of ontologico-respiratory reduction. This method will lead us back to the primacy of breathing. (shrink)

Apophaticism in mainstream analytic theology and philosophy of religion has come to denote a metaphysical and semantic thesis: that, due to divine transcendence, God is ineffable, inconceivable, or incomprehensible. But this conception fails to properly take account of the central claim of apophaticism as a special type of _mystical _theology. As such, the apophatic commitments to divine ineffability are instrumental. More fundamental is the function of theological ignorance to uniquely inform the task of theology and transform the theologian in union (...) with God. Taking Jonathan Jacobs’ recent account as a test case, I argue that reconstructions of apophaticism need to be supplemented by an account of this informational and personally transformative value that apophatic mysticism places on its commitment to divine incomprehensibility. I supply the needed account of apophatic valuing in terms of wonder as the appropriate emotional attitude toward divine transcendence. (shrink)

Early on in Specters of Marx, the first sentence in Exordium reads: ‘Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally’. In the last paragraph of the last chapter, Derrida gives the injunction: ‘If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost’. The ghost is the gift Derrida leaves us, yet, what can ghosts teach us about justice and how may (...) we (dare we) learn from them? Derrida invokes Levinas's name for the only time in Specters of Marx, with the line ‘The relation to others – that is to say, justice, writes Levinas’. From ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ to ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, the spectral relation between Derrida and Levinas already performs spectral justice. How do we say ‘J'accepte’ to spectral justice – justice that we cannot rightly possess? The figure and logic of the ghost serve not merely rhetorical purposes but, in its non-presence and presence, the ghost becomes the trace of the justice that we can neither own nor disown, but need to learn to live with, even if, in politics and in life, the fear of ghosts remains. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt has a particular notion of thinking that both is and is not philosophical. While not guided by the search for meta principles, nor concerned with establishing logical systems, her notion of thinking as the examination of “whatever happens to come to pass,” and its significance for saving our world from thoughtlessness, retains and is motivated by the fundamental pathos at the heart of philosophy—wonder. In this paper, I consider the limiting and enabling sense in which Arendt invokes “wonder” (...) for the possibility of thinking. I do so, in turn, to explore what the pathos of wonderment might offer education—an institution charged with cultivating “thinking” and, yet, constantly susceptible to the thoughtless trappings of technocratic jargon and the mechanical logic of assessment, learning processes and social reproduction. Can wonder—the very pathos of philosophy—cultivate a thinking that helps us retain an “unclouded attentiveness” to what is educational in education? Might wonder help us to overcome the thoughtlessness that dulls our attention to what we do to each other through education? (shrink)

Philosophy has four forms: wonder, faith, doubt and scepticism. These are not separate categories, but separate ideal possibilities. Modern academic philosophy has fallen, for several centuries, into an error: which is the error of supposing that philosophy is only what I call doubt. Philosophy may be doubt: indeed, it is part of my argument that this is undeniably one element of, or one possibility in, philosophy; but doubt is only one of four points of the compass. In this essay I (...) indicate the nature of each point of the compass as it has been found in the history of philosophy. (shrink)