Wonder, Silence, and Human Flourishing

Toward a Rehumanization of Health, Education, and Welfare

Author: Finn Thorbjørn Hansen, Solveig Botnen Eide, Carlo Leget, Åshild Slettebø, Merel Visse, Sine Maria Herholdt-Lomholdt, Aslaug Kristiansen, Claudia Welz and Randi Edland Kroken Series: Philosophical Practice

This book explores how a sense of wonder and the musicality of silence can be a rehumanizing force in education, health and welfare, countering overly anthropocentric and instrumental worldviews. Wonder—in an aesthetic, philosophical, and spiritual sense—brings human beings in resonance with the world again.

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Wonder, Silence, and Human Flourishing: Toward a Rehumanization of Health, Education, and Welfare approaches humanization and the process of re-enchantment in a radical new way. For more than a decade the call for rehumanization in education, care and welfare has been heard and discussed primarily in critical thinking, political theory, and sociological discourses. This critique is mainly based on a social constructivist and naturalistic worldview that keeps the discussion in an anthropocentric perspective. By focusing on the phenomenology and ethics of wonder as an ontological and even spiritual event, and by listening to the silence that follows this contemplative wonder, the contributors offer an existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutic way of understanding humanization.

Edited by Finn Thorbjørn Hansen, Solveig Eide Botnen, and Carlo Leget, the book shows, from various perspectives, that the force of wonder and the silence that follows from it can nurture our ability to be receptive to and present in human relations and in resonance with the meaning-giving life phenomena that surround us.

Critic Reviews

“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.”

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