Abstract

In the article the specificity of philosophy is considered as a path to spiritual-practical mastering of the world. The spiritual-practical structure of philosophy includes philosophic practice and philosophic consciousness. The latter actualizes in the forms of philosophic thinking and sensory-emotional reflection of reality. Philosophical sensuality has a wide range of manifestations, but its specificity is defined by the emotion of wonder. Wonder is a primal, basic emotion. Fear, curiosity, joy and a number of other emotions also belong to the category of basic emotions. In religious studies the ’theory of fear’ attributes the origin of religion to experience of fear. In psychology of emotion the curiosity is considered as a source of cognitive interest and scientific cognition. Appropriately, it may be possible to propose the ’theory of curiosity’ and the ’theory of wonder’ to explain the origin of science and philosophy. In the context of the theories the science and the religion differ in their emotional sources from the philosophy. The status of wonder as a basic emotion defines the emotional sovereignty of philosophy, its independence from other ways of spiritual-practical mastering of the world. Author demonstrates the incapacity of interpretations of doubt and suffering as emotional origins of philosophy. Doubt as uncertainty is a derivative of faith and lacks the status of basic emotion. The suffering is an emotional tone of every sensation, a pair of the emotional tone of pleasure. It is impossible to consider the suffering as an origin of philosophy due to both the effect of twoness of pleasure and suffering and their status of emotional tones. In addition, suffering is an affect, the repetition and accumulation of which conduces to the emotional discharge, an affective explosion. Therefore, they cannot be the sources of cognitive motion. The cognitive potential of wonder is defined by its character as positive emotion allowing for accumulation of ’wonder points’. The wonder discovers cognitive dissonance and stimulates the cognition by means of expanding the subject field of philosophy and stating new questions