Wonder, Silence, and Human Flourishing

This is a wonderful collection of essays that brings philosophical texts and, not least, philosophical ways of thinking into fruitful dialogue with experiences of professional practice. Through its emphasis on issues such as wonder, calling, silence, and particularity, it moves beyond a simple eschewal of the tyranny of the logic of measurement, and calls for a renewed attentiveness to the quiet spaces and encounters in which the world and others more genuinely address us. -- James McGuirk, VID Specialized University and Nord University
With equal measures of poetic thinking and critical scholarship, this volume truly rehumanizes and revitalizes the realms of health, education and welfare and show why they are not only important social and cultural pillars in our societies – but how they form a deeper ground for human belonging, wonder, and love. -- Søren Bengtsen, Aarhus University
This book is an important contribution to the expanding humaniora-related publications that represent a counter-voice, not to mention a counter-eye, -heart, and -hand in the human practices. The existential practice of wondering about something is a precondition for openness to the world and to others. The practice of wondering adds the quality of passivity, deceleration and, hopefully, thoughtfulness to our breathless work-life and our perceived lack of time for human relationships. The authors urge the reader to “open oneself up to the ethical and ontological dimension in human life and professions through a radical wonder-based and ‘not-knowing’ attitude and the ‘apophatic’ research virtues.” This book represents a grand but highly appreciated vision in today’s standardized, functionalist-oriented, and overly rational world. -- Tone Saevi, VID Specialized University
This distinctive and engaging book is true to the phenomenologist Jan Patocka’s vision of philosophy as care of the soul. The editors have brought together researchers who have a first-hand knowledge of the life-giving possibilities of approaching ordinary and professional life in a mode of openness and wonder. These possibilities are explored through consideration of a vast range of thinkers, from Buber, Wittgenstein, and Marcel to Løgstrup and Gadamer. What makes this volume especially valuable is that the contributors are immersed in education, literature, and nursing and bring experiences of wonder and stillness to the forefront of their dialogue with these philosophers. Readers will be moved by vivid accounts of the experience of being overtaken by wonder. Further, they will come away with an appreciation of the humanizing power of philosophy as a practice that both confronts the estrangement of our times and shows this estrangement is interrupted through spiritual connection with other people and nature. -- Steen Halling, Seattle University