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)

This thesis examines the impact of a new wonder that emerged through Iranians' travelling and observing educational progressions of advanced countries during the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In order to analyze the wonder that affected Iran's modern philosophy of education, the study first discusses the predominant themes within Iran's educational philosophy from pre-Islamic times to Qajar's traditional elementary schools. The second part of the study focuses on examining the element of wonder in philosophy and its evolving form in cultures (...) and societies. Subsequently, the new wonder and the early signs of a modern philosophy of education for Iran are examined in the last part of the study. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic is a tragedy for those who have been hard hit worldwide. At the same time, it is also a test of concepts and practices of what good care is and requires, and how quality of care can be accounted for. In this paper, we present our Care-Ethical Model of Quality Enquiry (CEMQUE) and apply it to the case of residential care for older people in the Netherlands during the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of thinking about care in healthcare (...) and social welfare as a set of separate care acts, we think about care as a complex practice of relational caring, crossed by other practices. Instead of thinking about professional caregivers as functionaries obeying external rules, we think about them as practically wise professionals. Instead of thinking about developing external quality criteria and systems, we think about cultivating (self-)reflective quality awareness. Instead of abstracting from societal forces that make care possible but also limit it, we acknowledge them and find ways to deal with them. Based on these critical insights, the CEMQUE model can be helpful to describe, interrogate, evaluate, and improve existing care practices. It has four entries: (i) the care receiver considered from their humanness, (ii) the caregiver considered from their solicitude, (iii) the care facility considered from its habitability and (iv) the societal, institutional and scholarly context considered from the perspective of the good life, justice and decency. The crux is enabling all these different entries with all their different aspects to be taken into account. In Corona times this turns out to be more crucial than ever. (shrink)

This essay describes the growing interest in and use of concepts such as phronesis and authenticity in educational research and practice. While phronesis seems to be connected to the ethical dimension of education and educational guidance, the concept of authenticity seems to be connected to the existential dimension. This essay shows the relatedness between those two concepts and the relevance of an “existence philosophical” perspective on phronesis and authenticity. The author points to the importance of an ontological approach where phronesis (...) and authenticity are understood as two ways of respectively sensing and understanding the Being-dimension. This existence philosophical approach opens up for a new kind of praxis of Philo-Sophia, which could be realized in teacher training, when the focus is on how to become more mindful and aware of the Bildung-process in education and guidance. The essay suggests that this Being-dimension can be approached through the emergence of Communities of Wonder between the teacher and teacher student in the classroom or guidance session. (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)

The proliferation of technology has changed the ways we are able to interact with the world, and, in turn, how we are able to interact with others. In recent years, online dating applications have become commonplace for connecting with others in search of romantic relationships. This paper reflects on the phenomenology of the first date after connecting online and explores several aspects of this unique experience of introduction, expectation, and relation. What occurs between two people online that leads them to (...) suggest meeting for the first time in the real world? How does communicating online differ from face to face encounters? Exploring the phenomenology of the first date after connecting online invites us to wonder about the nature of dating today and in the past. (shrink)

In this paper the author explores certain fulfilling personal experiences that he describes as the presencing of space, i.e. the way in which an individual’s spatial involvement may put him or her in contact with reality as a whole. These experiences are investigated from a phenomenological perspective, and the differences between them and other similar experiences, such as that of the sublime or topophilia, are highlighted. A neologism is introduced: topoaletheia to name a distinctive type of spatial experience. This concept (...) may enrich the discussion about our involvement with space in our built environments. (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.