Keywords

Inside Issue 12: Remembering Jane

Ronald K.L. Collins read

Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil: Decreation for the Anthropocene

Kathryn Lawson read

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)

 

 

Simone Weil: A Life in Letters

Robert Chenavier & André A. Devaux, editors read

    • 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.”