Attention, Asceticism and Grace: Simone Weil and Higher Education
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education
Attention
A Metaethical Study of Simone Weil’s Notion of Attention Through Critical Practical Analogy
University of the Arts London, PhD
“Beholding and Being beheld: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Ethics of Attention”
The Humanistic Psychologist, 43(2), 160–172
Teaching As A Moral Act: Simone Weil’s Liminality As An Addition To The Moral Conversation in Education
University of Central Florida, PhD
The Concept of Attention in Simone Weil: The Pure Eyes for Nothing
Kurenai (Feb. 20, 2009) in The Self, the Other and Language: Dialogue between Philosophy, Psychology and Comparative Education, pp. 71-74
The Concept of Attention in Simone Weil: Toward its Ordinariness and Creativity
Kurenai (March 31, 2009), Record of Clinical-Philosophical Pedagogy, vol. 9, pp. 115-121
Educating for Love of Wisdom : John Dewey and Simone Weil
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, PhD
Weil, Truth and Life: Simone Weil and Ancient Pedagogy as a Way of Life
Institute for Christian Studies, MA
The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality
Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. Sharon Cameron ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism—writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In essays on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, Cameron examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one’s voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous.
“To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?” Throughout these essays Cameron examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social foundation. Impersonality investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.
in Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays, Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2007, p. 108-143. Previously published: “The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 29 (Winter 2003), pp. 216-252
Simone Weil: An Apprenticeship in Attention
London: Continuum
