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Philosophy not only begins in wonder, argues Mary-Jane Rubenstein, but also should remain there, because it is wonder which keeps us properly attuned to the 'strangeness' and 'shock of the every day', and directs us to look ongoingly for 'the extraordinary in and through the ordinary' (pp. 23-4). Thus, fighting against what she perceives is the common philosophical tendency in the West to foreclose prematurely on wonder, Rubenstein urges us instead to ' stay with the perilous wonder that resists final resolution, simple identity, and sure teleology' (p. 24). Here, Plato's Socrates offers some initial inspiration: in his dialogue with Theaetetus, Socrates engages in the sort of wondering (thaumazein) which both initiates philosophical inquiry and sustains it, keeping it open, awash in uncertainty and indeterminacy. In further developing and defending this concept of wonder, Rubenstein relies heavily (though not uncritically) on four twentieth-century continental philosophers: Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. Heidegger in particular looms larger here, since he isolates what Rubenstein calls wonder's 'double movement': Erschrecken, or the initial 'shock . . . that, strictly speaking, beings cannot be' (p. 36), and Scheu, the subsequent 'awe' that beings nevertheless are -...