A philosopher explores the transformative role of wonder and awe in an uncertain world

Wonder and awe lie at the heart of life's most profound questions. Wonderstruck shows how these emotions respond to our fundamental need to make sense of ourselves and everything around us, and how they enable us to engage with the world as if we are experiencing it for the first time.

Drawing on the latest psychological insights on emotions, Helen De Cruz argues that wonder and awe are emotional drives that motivate us to inquire and discover new things, and that humanity has deliberately nurtured these emotions in cultural domains such as religion, science, and magic. Tracing how wonder and awe unify philosophy, the humanities, and the sciences, De Cruz provides new perspectives on figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, William James, Rachel Carson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Abraham Heschel. Along the way, she explains how these singular emotions empower us to be open-minded, to experience joy and hope, and to be resilient in the face of personal troubles and global challenges.

Taking inspiration from Descartes's portrayal of wonder as that sudden surprise of the soul, this illuminating book reveals how wonder and awe are catalysts that can help us reclaim what makes life worth living and preserve the things we find wonderful and valuable in our lives.

Thought experiments are tools philosophers and scientists use to investigate how things are, without actually having to go out and experiment in the real world. This book presents forty-two philosophical thought experiments. Each thought experiment is illustrated by De Cruz (who is an illustrator as well as a philosopher), and is summarized in one or two paragraphs, which is followed by a brief exploration of its significance. Each thought experiment also includes a longer (approximately 2-page) reflection, written by a philosopher who is a specialist in the field. De Cruz's unique illustrations serve as visual and accessible starting points for classroom discussions in Intro to Philosophy courses.

That sense of glory was worth the occasional beating...

Since his youth, Maarten has wandered the Low Countries, living from one handful of silver stuivers to the next. The urge to channel magic through his street art is like an itch, yet without the expensive accoutrements of his craft, he can never call himself a true magician.

One day, as he paints animated birds on the cobblestones before the college library in the proud city of Haltra, an irate librarian arrives to tell him off...

Born the daughter of a lowly shopkeeper, Johanna de Vries has spent her entire life working towards her modest position as a junior Scholar. She takes no pleasure in asking the young man to erase his artwork, but it is her responsibility to maintain the magical tomes of the library and prevent anyone from disrupting their delicate balance.

After their first rocky meeting, this unlikely pair find that perhaps their perspectives on life and art are not so different after all. Yet can love triumph amid the harsh realities of life on the streets?

Eric Kaplan, Television writer and producer (Big Bang Theory, Futurama):

In this love story between a homeless magician and a scholar of ancient books De Cruz brings to life an Oxford that is as once as real as a slap and as sweetly lyrical as a childhood dream. Her world is a world of class divides and chalk drawings that come to life: poignant, beautiful, romantic, and wry. Maarten and Johanna are characters you will take into your heart and treasure. And who will teach you things you always knew but somehow never saw as clearly - about art and love. And magic.

Would our world be a better place if some of us were benders?

Can Katara repair the world through care?

Is Toph a disability pride icon?

What does it mean for Zuko to be bad at being good?

Can we tell whether uncle Iroh is a fool or a sage?

The world is out of sorts. The four nations, Water, Earth, Fire, and Air, are imbalanced because of the unrelenting conquest of the Fire Nation. The only one who can restore balance to the world is the Avatar. On the face of it, Avatar: The Last Airbender is a story about a lone superhero. However, saving the world is a team effort, embodied in Team Avatar, aka the Gaang. Aang needs help from his friends and tutors, even from non-human animals. Through the teachings of Guru Pathik and Huu he comes to realize that though the world and its nations seem separate, we are all one people. We all have the same roots and we are all branches of the same tree.

Avatar: The Last Airbender and Philosophy brings to the fore the Eastern, Western, and Indigenous philosophies that are implicit in the show. Following Uncle Iroh's advice that it is important to draw wisdom from many traditions, this volume features contributions by experts on Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Indigenous schools of thought, next to focusing on Western classical authors such as Plotinus, Kant, and Merleau-Ponty. The volume is also unique in drawing on less common traditions such as black abolitionism, anarchism, and the philosophy of martial arts.

Intertwining experience and reflection, ATLA and Philosophy helps readers to deeply engage with today's burning questions, such as how to deal with ecological destruction, the aftermath of colonialism and genocide, and wealth inequality, using the tools from a wide range of philosophical traditions.

An examination of the cognitive foundations of intuitions about the existence and attributes of God.

Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously--at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos--even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition.

De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality.

This Element examines what we can learn from religious disagreement, focusing on disagreement with possible selves and former selves, the epistemic significance of religious agreement, the problem of disagreements between religious experts, and the significance of philosophy of religion. Helen De Cruz shows how religious beliefs of others constitute significant higher-order evidence. At the same time, she advises that we should not necessarily become agnostic about all religious matters, because our cognitive background colors the way we evaluate evidence. This allows us to maintain religious beliefs in many cases, while nevertheless taking the religious beliefs of others seriously.