Simone Weil: Basic Writings
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Related
Simone Weil’s Summary Notes “Concerning the Pythagorean Doctrine”, Attention (May 2024), translated & introduced by D.K. Levy and Marina Barabas
Books & Plays read more
Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil: Decreation for the Anthropocene
Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil (Routledge, 2024) places the philosophy of Simone Weil into conversation with contemporary environmental concerns in the Anthropocene.
The book offers a systematic interpretation of Simone Weil, making her ethical philosophy more accessible to non-Weil scholars. Weil’s work has been influential in many fields, including politically and theologically-based critiques of social inequalities and suffering, but rarely linked to ecology.
Kathryn Lawson argues that Weil’s work can be understood as offering a coherent approach with potentially widespread appeal applicable to our ethical relations to much more than just other human beings. She suggests that the process of “decreation” in Weil is an expansion of the self which might also come to include the surrounding earth and a vast assemblage of others. This allows readers to consider what it means to be human in this time and place, and to contemplate our ethical responsibilities both to other humans and also to the more-than-human world. Ultimately, the book uses Weil’s thought to decenter the human being by cultivating human actions towards an ecological ethics.
This book will be useful for Simone Weil scholars and academics, as well as students and researchers interested in environmental ethics in departments of comparative literature, theory and criticism, philosophy, and environmental studies.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Finding Simone Weil in an Ecological Void
Part I: Growing Roots: A Reading of Simone Weil
1. Mapping an Ethics of Decreation
2. The Faculties
3. The Power of Force
4. Attention and Mediation
5. Decreation and Action
Part II: Plato and the Environment
6. Contemporary Dualist Ecological Readings of Plato’s Phaedrus
7. A Non-dual Reading of Plato via Metaxu (μεταξύ)
Part III: Decreation for the Anthropocene
8. Weil and Anthropocene Ethics
9. A Weilian-Inspired Ecological Ethics
10. Action in the Anthropocene
About the Author
Kathryn Lawson is a lecturer of philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is co-editor of Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations (2024) and Breached Horizons: The Philosophy of Jean-Luc Marion(2017) and author of a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters.
Related
Kathryn Lawson & Joshua Livingstone, eds., Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)
Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations
Kathryn Lawson & Joshua Livingstone, eds., Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)
Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil were two of the most compelling political thinkers of the 20th century who, despite having similar life-experiences, developed radically distinct political philosophies. This unique dialogue between the writings of Arendt and Weil highlights Arendt’s secular humanism, her emphasis on heroic action, and her rejection of the moral approach to politics, contrasted starkly with Weil’s religious approach, her faith in the power of divine Goodness, and her other-centric ethic of suffering and affliction.
The writings here respect the profound differences between Arendt and Weil whilst pulling out the shared preoccupations of power, violence, freedom, resistance, responsibility, attention, aesthetics, and vulnerability. Without shying away from exploring the more difficult concepts in these philosophers’ works, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil also aims to pull out the relevance of their writings for contemporary issues.
About the Editors
Kathryn Lawson is a Lecturer and Researcher at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Simone Weil and Ecological Ethics: Decreation for the Anthropocene as well as several journal articles and book chapters on continental philosophy, religion, and Simone Weil.
Joshua Livingstone is a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is author of a forthcoming book chapter on Hannah Arendt and the Free Press.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Simone Weil
Lissa McCullough, editor, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Simone Weil (2024):
Lissa McCullough is Lecturer in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at California State University. Dr. McCullough’s research centers on modern philosophy of religion and interpretations of modernity. She has taught philosophy at CSUDH since fall 2014, and has previously taught religious studies at Muhlenberg College, Hanover College, and New York University. She completed her PhD at the University of Chicago, master’s degree at Harvard University, and bachelor at University of California Santa Cruz. She is author of The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil (I.B. Tauris, 2014), editor of The Call to Radical Theology by Thomas J. J. Altizer (SUNY, 2012) and Conversations with Paolo Soleri (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012); and coeditor, with Brian Schroeder, of Thinking Through the Death of God (SUNY, 2004). In 2008 she was a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University. She is also guest editor of a special issue on Thomas J. J. Altizer for the peer-reviewed online Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Winter 2019
The Need for Roots: The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations Towards the Human Being The Need for Roots
French philosopher Simone Weil’s best known work that promotes mindful living and instructs readers how they can once again feel rooted, in a cultural and spiritual sense, to their environment.
A Penguin Classic
One of the foremost French philosophers of the last century, Simone Weil has been described by André Gide as “the patron saint of all outsiders” and by Albert Camus as “the only great spirit of our time.” In this, her most famous work, she diagnoses the malaise at the heart of modern life: uprootedness, from the past and from community. Written towards the end of World War II for the Free French Army, Weil’s work is an indispensable and perpetually intriguing text for readers and students of philosophy everywhere. The book discusses the political, cultural and spiritual currents that ought to be nurtured so that people have access to sources of energy which will help them lead fulfilling, joyful and morally good lives.
Simone Weil: A Life in Letters
New Book (in French) of Notes of Weil’s Philosophy Class in Le Puy
Maria Villela-Petit on Weil and Sophocles
Simone Weil: A Life in Letters
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- Simone Weil: A Life in Letters (Belknap Press / Harvard University Press (Aug. 27, 2024), Robert Chenavier & André A. Devaux, editors, with Nicholas Elliott translator, and Marie-Noël Chenavier-Jullien, Annette Devaux, and Olivier Rey, contributors
“The inspiring letters of philosopher, mystic, and freedom fighter Simone Weil to her family, presented for the first time in English.
Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows, searching for her spiritual home while bearing witness to the violence that devastated Europe twice in her brief lifetime. The letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and ever-shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays.
The first complete collection of Weil’s missives to her family, A Life in Letters offers new insight into her personal relationships and experiences. The letters abound with vivid illustrations of a life marked by wisdom as much as seeking. The daughter of a bourgeois Parisian Jewish family, Weil was a troublemaking idealist who preferred the company of miners and Russian exiles to that of her peers. An extraordinary scholar of history and politics, she ultimately found a home in Christian mysticism. Weil paired teaching with poetry and even dabbled in mathematics, as evidenced by her correspondence with her brother, André, who won the Kyoto Prize in 1994 for the famed Weil Conjectures.
A Life in Letters depicts Simone Weil’s thought taking shape amid political turmoil, as she describes her participation in the Spanish struggle against fascism and in the transatlantic resistance to the Nazis. An introduction and notes by Robert Chenavier contextualize the letters historically and intellectually, relating Weil’s letters to her general body of writing. This book is an ideal entryway into Weil’s philosophical insights, one for both neophytes and acolytes to treasure.”
Simone Weil: A Very Short Introduction
Simone Weil: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, May 2024)
This Very Short Introduction provides an overview of the intriguing and provocative life and ideas of twentieth-century French philosopher, mystic, and social activist Simone Weil. Weil was not a typical, systematic philosopher. Despite her short life, Weil’s philosophy has much to offer us in our times of personal, communal, political, and environmental crises, both in the breath and poignancy of her philosophy, and the topics it covers.
In keeping with Weil’s spirit to consider and address laypeople, Rozelle-Stone takes readers, including those who have had little or no previous exposure to Weil or philosophy, on an accessible journey of Weil’s major philosophical impacts. This exploration consists of seven chapters highlighting: her life and manner of death, both characterized by attention; the influence of ancient Greek ideas on her philosophy; her thoughts on labour and politics; her unique and ecumenical religious inspirations, stemming from Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism; her ethical philosophy centred on a specific notion of attentiveness; her understanding of beauty as connected to fragility but also eternity; and finally, her legacy and influence on contemporary writers and issues, particularly as she may help us navigate and critically assess the growing convergence between religious fervour, late capitalist and corporate values, and authoritarian politics.
Related
Weil: Basic Writings (Routledge, 2024) edited by D. K. Levy and Marina Barabas.
