Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe

Western philosophy's relationship to "wonder" is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished. This study argues that by endeavoring to resolve wonder's indeterminacy, philosophy has secured itself at the expense of its own condition of possibility.

Strange Wonder locates a reopening of this primordial uncertainty in the work of Martin Heidegger, whose "wonder"...