“Simone Weil’s Phenomenology of the Body, Comparative and Continental Philosophy”
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol. 4, # 2
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Theory and Praxis: Simone Weil and Marx on the Dignity of Labor
Simone Weil had an ambivalent attitude toward Marx. While she thought that the young Marx’s celebration of labor had “lyrical accents,” she ultimately believed that Marx had neglected his own insights, embracing a blind worship of mechanization and a theory of history and revolution that was insufficiently attentive to the material conditions of workers. Marx, in her view, was insufficiently materialist and excessively wedded to a hierarchical model of science that maintained the domination of management. Weil and Marx’s attitudes toward the dignity of labor and the necessary conditions for socialism are analyzed. The most significant cleavage between them is ultimately due to the differing manner in which they conceive of the relationship between thought and action. Through this comparison, the philosophical underpinnings of the two radically different conceptions of labor and its dignity as a human activity are explained.
The Review of Politics, vol. 74, no. 1, pp. 87-107
“The Pursuit of Democratic Socialism: The Political Thinking of George Orwell and Simone Weil”
Esprit, issues 8-9, pp. 69-71
“Affliction, Revolt, and Love: A Conversation Between Camus and Weil”
in Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre, ed., The Originality and Complexity of Albert Camus’s Writings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 125-142
The Theology of Simone Weil and the Topology of André Weil
Religious Studies in Japan, Vol.1, no. 1, pp. 1-14
“Simone Weil’s Politics”
Esprit, issues 8-9, pp. 30-51
Mathematics and Religion: on a Remark by Simone Weil
Logic in Theology, pp. 219-236
Simone Weil’s Phenomenology of the Body
Abstract: Major thinkers of the twentieth-century (Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Whitehead) explored the conditions for the possibility of perception, language, and thought, and Merleau-Ponty in particular addressed the physi- cal body as a condition of existing and being situated in the world. Although French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) has not been recognized as belonging in this stream of philosophical history, this article seeks to dem- onstrate that Weil was a pioneering phenomenologist of the body; for remarkably like Merleau-Ponty—yet more than a decade before him in the early 1930s—Simone Weil’s thinking centered on the foundational role of the body in structuring thought and ordering the world. The body is the first and primary orderer of experience for Weil: it grasps relations intuitively, pre-linguistically, and mediates action and thought. Weil’s body-thinking reconfigures the basis of thinking itself, positing that bodily movement is the factor sine qua non that enables ordered spatial-temporal perception, a perception on which the most abstract reaches of language and thought depend.
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 2 (2012): pp. 195–218
“Albert Camus and Simone Weil: A Sense of Tragedy and a Yearning for Beauty”
Esprit, issues 8-9, pp. 92-115
War and Work are the Forces of Life
History News Network, Columbian College of Arts & Sciences, The George Washington University.
