Description:
Genevieve Lloyd illuminates and challenges some perplexing aspects of contemporary attitudes to wonder. Central to her argument is the claim that wonder has come to be largely eclipsed by the allure of the notion of the Sublime - a concept closely associated with Romantic Idealism.
Lloyd offers us a renewed sense of wonder, reconnected with its philosophical history, that plays a significant role in contemporary social critique. In her path to reclaim wonder, she moves between philosophical and literary sources. She draws especially on Flaubert's responses to Romanticism and his related treatment of stupidity, which influenced the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. She also reaches into contemporary debates on refugees, secularisation and climate change.
Brief description: Genevieve Lloyd is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. Her main research areas have been in History of Philosophy, Philosophy and Literature and Feminist Philosophy. She is the author of Reclaiming Wonder: After the Sublime (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), Enlightenment Shadows (Oxford University Press, 2013), Providence Lost (Harvard University Press, 2008), Collective Imaginings(Routledge, 1999), Spinoza and the Ethics (Routledge, 1996), Part of Nature (Cornell University Press, 1994), Being in Time (Routledge, 1993) and The Man of Reason (2nd edn) (Routledge,1993).
Review Quotes: In this wide-ranging exploration of wonder - its philosophic history, its psychological manifestations, its political implications - Lloyd reclaims its ancient connection to the liberating activities of the imagination. She traces the transformation of Platonic and Aristotelian wonder as the beginning of inquiry to Flaubert's evocation of its stupefaction and Arendt's solemn attentiveness. The book concludes with a sensitive account of the role of wonder in facing the impasses of political dogmas as well as in prompting their imaginative re-visions. Lloyd uses her reclamation of wonder to illuminate our bewilderment, despair... and inventiveness in the face of radical Otherness.-- "Amélie Rorty, Harvard Medical School and Tufts University"