Simone Weil
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University.
Biographical
My Father André Weil
Excerpt:
Almost twenty years have passed since my father’s death on August 6th, 1998, yet he still sometimes calls me: “Sylvie, get me out of here, I’m bored.” (The French word he uses is not so polite.)
I am sure that, following Jewish tradition, André was assigned a study companion for all eternity. I had once asked him who this companion would be. “Euler,” he answered, and smiled. So when he calls me to tell me he is bored, I ask: “What about Euler? Is he bored, too?”
Nothing horrified my father more than being bored or wasting time. Every moment needed to be usefully or pleasantly employed. I still have my father’s letters to me when I was a teenager. He recommended extraordinary programs: evenings were given to reading Euripides and Sophocles, Thursdays at the Louvre or the Comédie Française, Sunday afternoons at the Salle Pleyel to hear Beethoven…. The idealism of these letters makes me smile, but reactivates the terrible guilt I felt because, at fifteen, I just wanted to have a good time.
Communication, vol. 65, no. 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 54-57
Strange and Intelligent
aeon
Weil Waiting: On the 75th Anniversary of Simone Weil’s Visit to New York
Los Angeles Review of Books
Simone Weil: Reason, faith, and empathy
Excerpts: “What would Weil think of the world we inhabit today? . . . .”
“Whenever I read Weil’s words, I ask myself the same question. What would she think of the world we inhabit today? The fact that academic interest in her work has skyrocketed in recent years suggests that many people have the same question. What would she say about Brexit, a U.S. president elected on a platform of nativism and xenophobia, and the rise of far-right political parties across Europe? What would be her response to the five-year civil war in Syria and the ongoing reality of global terrorism? What would she say about environmental degradation and the mass extinction of species that human activity has caused? What would she make of artificial intelligence and the increased power that humans are choosing to give machines?”
US Catholic (May 31, 2017)
Jeannine M. Pitas is a writer, teacher, and Spanish-English literary translator currently living in Dubuque, Iowa, where she teaches English and Spanish at the University of Dubuque. She is also a regular contributor to the Catholic blog Vox Nova.
Simone Weil: Sketches for an Unwritten Biography
Forty-Five: A Journal of Outside Researchreviewed by Christopher Hamilton
God Isn’t Dead, He’s Silent’: Simone Weil Dies, Very Young
Jewish World
Interview with Benjamin Braude
The Boisi Center, no. 102
Simone’s Svengalis: A Petainist, a Missionary, and the Making of Simone Weil
Abstract
Two of the first books published in the name of the brilliant absolutist Simone Weil (1909-43), La Pesanteur el la Grâce (Gravity and Grace) (1947/8) and Attente au Dieu (Waiting on/for God) (1950), were tendentiously fashioned. Consequently, the packaging that her Svengalis—the Petainist Gustave Thibon and the missionary Joseph-Marie Perrin—imposed, so severely distorted her thought that the first is no longer considered by French specialists to be her own work and the second has no stable text. Nevertheless, these two problematic books have defined Simone Weil. This [interview] reveals the origins and purposes of the books that Thibon and Perrin created.
Boisi Center (Feb. 11, 2015).
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Benjamin Braude is an associate professor of history at Boston College. His research focuses on the construction of collective identities in the Middle East and Europe, as well as Jewish and Ottoman history. He spoke with Boisi Center associate director Erik Owens before his presentation on the controversial legacy of 20th-century philosopher Simone Weil at the Boisi Center.
A Strange Christian: Simone Weil
This article appears in Katherine Davies & Toby Garfitt, eds., God’s Mirror: Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid–Twentieth Century, New York: Fordham University Press (2015), pp. 69-87.
Florence de Lussy is the honorary general curator in the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of France and has devoted 27 years to editing The Complete Works of Simone Weil.
God’s Mirror presents perspectives on intellectual, cultural, and political questions faced by French and French-Canadian intellectuals who engaged with Catholicism in the period 1930-50, in the diverse but related fields of philosophy, theology, politics, literature, and music. Names include Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, Paul Valéry, Simone Weil, and many others.
