Between “natural disease of the mind” and curative “studious passion” The polysemy of “curiosity” in the Essays

Through the dual prism of disease and cure, this article reexamines the equivocations of “curiosity” under five different aspects: the moral one, as part of the crisis of inherited values; the political one, as a contagious illness in times of turmoil; the anthropological one, as natural and original human condition; the medical one, as a symptom of mental morbidity and vitality; and the epistemological one, as experience of the limits and the possibilities in a world in perpetual motion.