Intellectual curiosity

History

In antiquity, the Roman philosopher Cicero wrote about humans' innate love of learning:

So great is our innate love of learning and of knowledge that no one can doubt that man's nature is strongly attracted to these things even without the lure of any profit. For my part, I believe Homer had something of this sort in view in his imaginary account of the songs of the Sirens. Apparently, it was not the sweetness of their voices or the novelty and diversity of their songs, but their professions of knowledge that used to attract the passing voyagers; it was the passion for learning that kept men rooted to the Sirens' rocky shores.

— Marcus Tullius Cicero,

In 1738, the Scottish philosopher David Hume differentiated intellectual curiosity from a more primitive form of curiosity:

The same theory, that accounts for the love of truth in mathematics and algebra, may be extended to morals, politics, natural philosophy, and other studies, where we consider not the other abstract relations of ideas, but their real connexions and existence. But besides the love of knowledge, which displays itself in the sciences, there is a certain curiosity implanted in human nature, which is a passion derived from a quite different principle. Some people have an insatiable desire of knowing the actions and circumstances of their neighbors, though their interest be no way concerned in them, and they must entirely depend on others for their information; in which case, there is no room for study or application. Let us search for the reason of this phenomenon.

— David Hume, A treatise of human nature (p. 453),

In Martin Heidegger's 1927 influential work Being and Time, he remarks that all forms of intellectual curiosity are clearing up the Dasein. In the section of the text relevant to curiosity, he begins by starting off with literature on basic sight as a form of "uncovering the Dasein". However, this (on basic sight allowing humans to realize their Dasein) is later generalized to include almost all forms of intellectual inquiry. He also cites Saint Augustine's Confessions for developing this idea.

Later, in 1954, Berlyne differentiated it into perceptual curiosity and epistemic curiosity, and in 2004 a psychometric scale to assess epistemic and perceptual curiosity was developed.