Attention
An Organizational Guide to Simone Weil’s “Reflections on the Good Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”
The Value of “Failed Experiments” in School Studies
Weil, Attention and Humility
Slowness and Delight: Learning from Weil in the First-Year University English Classroom
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.
Attention, Availability, and the Reading of Books
Attentive Pedagogy: Essays on Simone Weil’s “Reflections on the Good Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”
Book Review: The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil
Excerpt: “‘Attention, Iris Murdoch tells us in ‘The Idea of Perfection’, is “the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.’ (Murdoch 1999: 327). She takes this to be the characteristic and proper mark of moral agents, a claim that is both descriptive – a claim about what in fact characterises us as agents – and normative – a claim about how we should act, what we need to do more of in order to become better moral agents.
Silvia Caprioglio Panizza follows Murdoch in making both of these claims. Her new book The Ethics of Attention is an extended discussion of the role and importance of attention within our moral lives. Panizza here draws on the work of Murdoch and Simone Weil to explore the nature and moral importance of attention. This commonplace and recognisable activity, she suggests, is both essential for accessing moral truth and also morally significant in and of itself. Moreover, it is ‘fundamental to morality’ (16) in that many of the other things we care about morally (such as moral knowledge and moral motivation) are well-understood as depending on attention.'”
- Cathy Mason, Book Review: “The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza” (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), pp. 179, forthcoming in Philosophy.
Cathy Mason is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Central European University.
