Keywords

Education and the ethics of attention: The work of Simone Weil

Peter Roberts read

This paper argues that the influential French thinker, Simone Weil, has something distinctive and important to offer educational and ethical inquiry. Weil’s ethical theory is considered against the backdrop of her life and work, and in relation to her broader ontological, epistemological and political position. Pivotal concepts in Weil’s philosophy – gravity, decreation, and grace – are discussed, and the educational implications of her ideas are explored. The significance of Weil’s thought for educationists lies in the unique emphasis she places on the development of attention, a notion elaborated here via the key themes of truth, beauty, and love.

British Journal of Educational Studies (Aug. 22, 2022)

 

Philosophy for Darker Times: An Approach to Simone Weil’s Insights 

Noel Boulting read

This important new study examines the work of Simone Weil; French mystic, social philosopher, and activist in the French Resistance in the Second World War. Weil’s posthumously published works had a major influence on French and English social thought. Philosophy for Darker Times relates Weil’s insights to specific significant issues in our own time.

Ethics International Press, Inc (June 15, 2022)

Table of Contents 

Introduction

Chapter 1         The God of Philosophy and the God of Religion Debate Revisited

Chapter 2         Plato’s Philosophy Manifested in Simone Weil’s life and her Writings

Chapter 3         ‘Scale Relative Ontology’ as a way of understanding Simone Weil’s treatment of Scientific Activity

Chapter 4         Nothing, Mysticism and three dimensions in ‘Scale Relative Ontology’

Chapter 5         Simone Weil’s Mysticism understood through Apophatic Theology

Chapter 6         Intentionalism and ‘God’s Fiction’

Appendix I       Five Scientific Metaphysical Stances in relation to the Standard Model of Quantum Theory

Appendix II      On the Relationship between Simone Weil’s and Hannah Arendt’s  Philosophies

Appendix III    The Stumbling Block: The Rationality Problem

The Author

Bibliography

About the author

Noel Boulting studied at the London Institute of Education, Birkbeck College, London, and the London School of Economics He has taught philosophy at Universities in the in the UK and USA. His philosophy club, NOBOSS, was formed in 1977, and meets at the University of Kent, UK. His publications include articles on C. S. Peirce, Edward Bullough, Thomas Hobbes, Aldo Leopold, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone Weil, Vico, Max Horkheimer and the Aesthetics of Nature. His writings on Weil include:

‘None Enters Here Unless He is a Geometer’: Simone Weil on the Immorality of Algebra

Aviad Heifetz read

Abstract

The French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) thought of geometry and algebra not as complementary modes of mathematical investigation, but rather as constituting morally opposed approaches: whereas geometry is the sine qua non of inquiry leading from ruthless passion to temperate perception, in accord with the human condition, algebra leads in the reverse direction, to excess and oppression. We explore the constituents of this argument, with their roots in classical Greek thought, and also how Simone Weil came to qualify it following her exchange with her brother, the mathematician André Weil.

Axiomathes,  vol. 32, no. 2 (July, 2022)

About the Author 

Aviad Heifetz is a professor in the Department of Management and Economics at the Open University of Israel.

Dialectics of Silence for a Time of Crisis: Rethinking the Visionary Insights of Michel Serres and Simone Weil

Marjolein Oele read

This paper examines the figure of silence in the works of Michel Serres and Simone Weil. It argues that, in the spirit of Serres and Weil, our time of crisis calls not for a short-term response, but for long-term engagement in a dialectics of silence: the dialogical movement between the silencing of institutions and the attentive silence of visionary insights. Such dialectics can revalidate the value of institutional silencing if based on solid rational proof (rebutting so-called visionary ideas that are baseless) while simultaneously showing the value of visionary ideas that rightfully combat problematic institutional silencing. Especially in this current moment, in which science and scientific propositions are relentlessly questioned, there is a need to lean into silence so as to promote a productive dialogue that regains trust in proven scientific ideas and institutions while allowing visionary insights their place as well, provided that we are willing to test them.

About the author

Marjolein Oele is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco and was trained as an MD at the Free University of Amsterdam. She has a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and received her PhD in philosophy in 2007 from Loyola University Chicago

Review of Eric O. Springsted’s “Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century”

Dean Hammer read

Simone Weil is an enigmatic figure: a philosopher whose thoughts we know largely through fragments; a mystic who had her own complicated relationship with the Catholic Church; a pacifist who worked for the Resistance; an intellectual who took a sabbatical to join with unskilled female laborers in gruelling and humiliating factory work; and a theologian whose view of the human condition is as compassionate as it is severe. Eric Springsted offers a version of Weil for the twenty-first century. This is not a comprehensive treatment of Weil’s corpus. For example, her early Marxist works on oppression and revolution are almost completely absent. What comes to the fore is a nuanced interpretation of what Springsted refers to as Weil’s “retheologization of the political” (146). Springsted’s version of Weil is a gentler one than provided by some of her critics. But his own lifelong engagement with Weil provides for compelling reading. . . .

Springsted has written a deeply thoughtful and engaging book about a complicated thinker. How the argument is framed, though, limits both the reach and power of the interpretation. He positions his interpretation as a reaction to Martin Heidegger, the postmodern world (without reference to any author or text) in which there is neither depth nor responsibility for one’s thought, and liberalism that transforms public discourse into a language of individual rights. Invoking the usual suspects, however, has the effect of talking past what may be the pressing problems facing the twenty-first century: the fundamental decay of democratic norms, the resurgence of white nationalism, and the division of a nation into strangers who neither understand nor trust each other. Similarly absent is any reflection on the history or complexities of the theologization of politics up to the current day, which is at least as problematic as its detheologization in liberalism. Weil provides perspective on these issues in her willingness to embrace, rather than resolve, the contradictions of human existence, to listen to the suffering of the voiceless, and to introduce a decentering vocabulary of justice, love, and humility that changes how we relate to each other and the world. Hearing the critique requires attention. And that is Weil’s and Springsted’s point.

Review of Politics, vol. 84, no. 3 (June 17, 2022).