Weird Wonder In Merleau-ponty, Object-oriented Ontology, And New Materialism

As an epistemological concept, philosophy has focused on defining wonder. That is, it has attempted to answer the question: what is wonder? But the task of defining wonder is also the task of rendering wonder a static tool used to guide our inquiries. I argue that reading the phenomenological and ontological work of Merleau-Ponty through recent insights from new materialism and object-oriented ontology challenges not only our claims to knowledge, but also our conception of wonder as a static tool that can be easily disregarded.