Eric MacTaggart

Wonder plays a role in many aspects of our lives—e.g., in appreciating art and nature, religious experiences, and scientific and philosophical inquiry— and there is a wide variety of intuitive cases of the experience. This diversity raises philosophically interesting questions like, What is wonder? In what ways is this experience valuable? Are there objects at which we ought not wonder? Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes note the significance of wonder, yet there have been few attempts to answer these questions in a systematic way. My dissertation aims to provide such answers. I show how understanding wonder as a type of experience of beauty—an idea that has not received serious attention—reveals new insights about wonder’s nature and value. After I examine and make necessary modifications to features of wonder that are often cited in the literature, I further develop my picture of wonder and its relation to beauty by drawing on Alexander Nehamas’s account of the latter. My characterization of wonder and the inquiry associated with this experience provides resources for thinking about the normative evaluations that we can make about episodes of wonder. Drawing on these investigations and neo-Aristotelian work on virtue, I develop an account of virtuous wonder (i.e., the disposition to experience wonder in appropriate ways) and argue that this trait is an aesthetic and intellectual virtue. Similarly, I bring together Aristotelian ideas and my previous insights to propose methods for cultivating this character virtue.

The Italian term sprezzatura refers to making what one does appear nonchalant and effortless when it in fact involves calculation and effort. This notion, which comes from Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, captures a practice that permeates many areas of our aesthetic lives, from the performing arts to everyday social interactions, and is useful for criticism and appreciation. However, this concept has received little attention in philosophical aesthetics. By filling out and making more precise Castiglione’s casual and indirect remarks about sprezzatura, I show how this concept both points to heretofore underappreciated aesthetic values and helps us see important aesthetic and moral differences between cases that otherwise seem alike.