This paper is rooted in the Wonderful Education Project and the international conference on Wonder, Education and Human Flourishing which took place in the spring of 2019 at Vrije University in the Netherlands. After the conference professor Anders Schinkel kindly asked me to contribute with two papers to the open access anthology Wonder, Education, and Human Flourishing: Theoretical, Empirical, and Practical Perspectives published by VU University Press. One of the contributions involved a revised version of the talk '“Weird Fiction: A Catalyst for Wonder”, which I gave at the conference. The other a entirely new piece on wonder, education and human flourishing.
Concerning ‘The Importance of Wonder in Human Flourishing’ I remember feeling most honored by this request but I was also apprehensive because although I considered myself well versed in the topics professor Schinkel put before me I feared the ghost of repetition. If this new piece was to be worth it's salt I had to come up with something original. Something new.
In the end I took on the challenge and simply sat down and asked myself three questions:
What is wonder?
What is human flourishing?
In what way is Wonder important to Human Flourishing?
The work was quite engaging and I did my best to make the text informative, rigorous as well as entertaining and I deliberately made use of vivid examples some of them fictional others taken from real life in order to clarify important points. I also sought not to reuse old material.
Now it is my sincere hope that this particular paper will be useful to all who reads it because it concerns the very way we live our lives. Now this might sound strange or perhaps even pompous but if this is indeed so I dare you to read the article paying particular attention to the closing invitation which should defuse any such thoughts.
Sections
Preliminaries
On the Philosophy of Wonder
On the Philosophy of Human Flourishing
On the Importance of Wonder in Human Flourishing
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