Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have emphasised that our thinking about reality starts in wonder, but what does that mean? Is wonder some subjective fluffy feeling, an emotional response to particular aspects of reality, or something more vital, complex and even ontological? William Desmond will explore diverse facets of wonder as astonishment to help us appreciate the many aspects of its importance and the dangers of its absence or suppression; his lecture will be responded to by Catherine Pickstock.
William Desmond is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at KU Leuven and David Cook Visiting Chair at Villanova University, USA. He is the author of many monographs including several books on the philosophy of Hegel, on art, on dialectic. He is most known for his metaxological trilogy on the understandings and implications of the ‘between’: Being and the Between (1995), Ethics and the Between (2001), God and the Between (2008).
Catherine Pickstock is Professor of Metaphysics and Poetics in the Faculty of Divinity in Cambridge. She is the author of After Writing: The Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (1998) and Repetition and Identity (2013). Her work is concerned with the relationship between philosophy and theology especially in connection with language, poetics and the history of ideas. She is currently working on two forthcoming monographs Aspects of Truth and Platonic Poetics.
This event is part of the Lecture Series 2017-18: Grammars of Wonder. Free entrance. Refreshments will follow.
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