“Let Them Eat Cake: Articulating a Weilian Critique of Distributive Justice”
in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 41-60
Articles read more
“Captured Time: Simone Weil’s Vital Temporality Against the State”
in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 161-184.
“Simone Weil & the Impossible: A Radical View of Religion and Culture”
in David Tracy, Filaments: Theological Profiles, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Simone Weil: Against Being True to Yourself
in Charlotte Alston, Amber Carpenter & Rachael Wiseman, eds., Portraits of Integrity: 26 Case Studies from History, Literature, and Philosophy, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pp. 141-149.
D.K. Levy is a moral philosopher working in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.
Simone Weil’s ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’: A Comment
The purpose of this article is to provide a comment on Simone Weil’s brief but seminal essay ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.’ It complements an earlier one on Weil’s Lectures on Philosophy. The essay was sent via a letter to her friend and mentor, the Catholic priest, and Dominican friar, Father Joseph-Marie Perrin O.P. It set out her belief that school studies should provide the individual pupil or student with an education in the value and acquisition of attention. This, Weil believed, would be of fundamental value when reaching out to God through prayer. Such a capacity for attention would also enhance the student’s general academic and social learning providing a basis for authentic dialogue with others, and not only teachers and schoolfellows. The article introduces her as a religious philosopher, explains the origins of the essay, and Weil’s friendship with Father Perrin, who was her Christian religious mentor, examines the text itself, considers some critical commentaries, and assesses its relevance to the philosophy and practice of education today.
RUDN Journal of Philosophy, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 398-409
The Identity of Man – Winch Between Spinoza, Weil, and Wittgenstein
Throughout his philosophical career, Peter Winch had a particular interest in the philosophy of Spinoza, as is evidenced not only by a variety of references on a diverse range of issues in his works but also by several lectures and seminars he delivered on this thinker. A reconstruction of his interpretation of Spinoza’s system, which unites epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical considerations as mutually dependent, brings to the fore Winch’s interest in the individual not only as an important epistemological but equally as a moral agent, who is embedded in a web of circumstances that shape her view on the world and the possibilities and options she is able to entertain. Moreover, in his reading of Spinoza, the focus on the irreducibility of the individual’s standpoint is also connected to the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, a connection which adds at the same time an emphasis on a fundamental limitation of moral philosophy in general.
Sarah Trooper, “The Identity of Man – Winch Between Spinoza, Weil, and Wittgenstein,” in Michael Campbell & Lynette Reid, eds., Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter Winch, Springer (2020), pp. 135-148
The Politics of Rootedness: On Simone Weil and George Orwell
Simone Weil and George Orwell both reflected—at a time when liberalism and Christianity were being challenged—on how to provide rootedness to societies and how to provide a moral anchoring and collective inspiration. The chapter considers the extent to which religion plays an important role in these authors’ politics of rootedness. A comparison between them suggests that rather than worrying first about whether or not we need a religious revival, we should worry about whether individuals have the opportunity to enter into contact with beauty. For both Weil and Orwell, a society is well-rooted when there is a continuity between natural beauty and social life. As such, a politics of rootedness entails, in their view, a genuine search for the recognition of all members of a collectivity and, above all, the search for a way of learning again how to find nourishment in the beauty of the world.
in Sophie Bourgault & Julie Daigle, eds., Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 103-123.
God Comes to Her: A Kantian Reflection on Evil and Religious Experience in St. Teresa of Ávila and Simone Weil
Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1-22
The Power to Say I. Reflections on the Modernity of Simone Weil’s Mystical Thought
Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, pp. 165-181
The Art of Conjecturing: On Karen Olsson’s ‘The Weil Conjectures
Los Angeles Review of Books
