La meraviglia, emozione dell'anomalo

Wonder is a passion for discontinuity, novelty, and anomaly. It arises when we are confronted with phenomena that lie between the regular and the irregular, continuity and discontinuity, the particular and the universal. This is the thesis of my contribution. I take my cue from Descartes, the leading advocate of the reevaluation of wonder in the modern era. He included wonder in his new classification of the passions as a gateway to the emotional universe, activated when a new or anomalous object captures our attention and stimulates new knowledge. This conceptual framework is helpful for understanding the phenomenon in current research. When understood as surprise, wonder figures in contemporary classifications of so-called basic emotions as an adaptive response linked to survival in the face of potential threats posed by unexpected phenomena. The third part discusses two historical examples of objects capable of arousing wonder, namely Renaissance Wunderkammer and monsters, both sources of intellectual curiosity and stimuli for scientific research.