Attention, Asceticism and Grace: Simone Weil and Higher Education
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. l. 68, pp. 203 – 227
Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 41-55
Sofia de Melo Araujo & Fatima Vieira, eds., Iris Murdoch: Philosopher Meets Novelist (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 103-116.
The problems of nihilism and absurdism as presented in the works of Samuel Beckett which presuppose a bleak view of the world without transcendence are effectively solved by turning to Simone Weil’s philosophy which appropriates key absurdist premises in its transcendence-centered interpretation of knowledge and experience. Weil’s rereading of religion appropriates important criticisms from existentialist-absurdist writers like Beckett and critics of traditional religion. It is possible to transcend the absurdist impasse by turning to Weil. Notebooks of Weil are here read as providing important insights to answer absurdist nihilist pessimist vision.
Teresian Journal of English Studies, vol. 3, no. 1 (2011), pp. 21-27
Alasdair MacIntyre has urged a project for philosophers of faith to do philosophy in such a way as to address the deeper human concerns underlying philosophy’s basic questions. This essay examines where Wittgenstein’s later philosophy makes a contribution to that sort of project. It notes the importance of his doctrine of “meaning as use” for thinking philosophically about religion; it is centered in the life-world of religious people. But it also deals with issues arising from Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy should be a sort of conceptual therapy that undoes confusion and leaves everything as it is, i.e., his defactoism. It argues that there is an underlying sense of value. This changes from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. In the latter, he ultimately shows a commitment to a philosophical value of openness and willingness to transform one’s mind by the discovery of what is given.
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 85.4 (Fall, 2011) 547-563.
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion, vol. 1, no. 9, pp. 1-24
The New Criterion
in Rozelle-Stone, A. Rebecca & Stone, Lucian, eds., The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, New York: Continuum, pp. 205-220
The Review of Politics, vol. 72, pp. 79-96