Tag: Wonder

• December 24, 2014

  Openness, wonder, and joy

  Philosophy is not for those who presume to know all there is to know. Nor is it for those who, being bourgeois, take life to be wholly self-explanatory. ‘The commonplace mind,’ writes Josef Pieper in ‘The Philosophical Act,’ ‘rendered deaf-mute, finds everything self-explanatory’ to the point at which ‘”wonder” is no longer there.’ Now that must be…
• April 7, 2012

  ‘What was most essential for us could not be expressed’

  In this remarkable excerpt from the opening pages of The Present Alone is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Marc Djaballah, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009, 5-7, Pierre Hadot speaks about the boyhood mystical experiences that led him, many years later, to embrace philosophical inquiry. “What was most essential for us,”…