Such illustrations also foreground the curiosity that leads us to build expertise and to hone a craft.

Long before psychology used qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the science of curiosity as a mental state or a personality trait with corresponding behaviors, there was philosophy. And long before neuroscience used neuroimaging and data science to understand the neural circuitry and systems that precondition curiosity, there was

One need never worry that the last piece of the puzzle will be found, instilling the sadness of completion, the permanent loss of future puzzling.

This is the sort of curiosity that is edge driven, not only learning what and how things belong, but also building heretofore unimaginable lines of belonging. It is inquisitiveness untethered to acquisition.

We call up different canons, explore different peripheries, and take scholastic risks of different altitudes depending on our field-specific expectations. We do this because we believe in the promise of curiosity, but also the pleasure of curiosity.

There is a depth of wisdom in language’s flexibility, in the soma of its poetry.

Natural to every human heart, curiosity extends to anything and everything that is “connected” to an individual inquirer’s well-being.

While we hold the brain in our hands, the mind hovers above us chuckling.

And yet across its long and messy history, philosophy also houses all kinds of other possibilities for thinking differently—possibilities that surfaced here and there, but never got codified into paradigms or sedimented into theories; possibilities that still lie dormant.