Brandon Yip proposes a framework for wonder that accounts for its heterogeneity and explains and clarifies disputes about the ethics of wonder. The various species of wonder are unified as responses to a recurrent practical situation: that of recognising that our cognitive structures require alteration in order to accommodate some object. This recognition is momentous in its implications for the self, yet its evaluative implications can be indeterminate. Its momentousness and ambivalence provoke a variety of secondary appraisals and coping responses that are built up around wonder’s core appraisal. The heterogeneity of wonder, therefore, reflects the diversity of ways human beings grapple with the limits of understanding and the possibilities of transformation. The ethical drama of negotiating one’s relationship with the wonderful object explains how questions about the ethics of wonder emerge.

Brandon Yip is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Lee Kong Chian Fellow at the Singapore Management University. Previously, he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, and he completed his PhD at ANU. His research covers a range of interconnected questions in moral psychology, epistemology, and meta-ethics, with an eye to how these connect with broader questions in social philosophy.