Language

The Future of Thinking in a Digital Age

Ronald KL Collins read

How we think is shaped by what we read and how we read. The “how” is a vital part of the equation. Much the same holds true for writing and how we express our thoughts. In both instances, method should play its part though it must be neither mechanical nor categorical. Rather, such method should be a way of opening the mind rather than cabining it. Yet so much of the process of contemporary scholarship cuts against this grain. Why?

Epoché, issue # 41 (June 2021)

Semantics of the Unspeakable: Six Sentences by Simone Weil

James Winchell read

Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, (n.d.) pp. 72-93

“Simone Weil on having an inner life”

Eric Springsted listen

We readily recognize the concept of an inner life as a moral category. We struggle to say what an inner life is, though. This essay examines and rejects naturalistic attempts to either dismiss the idea of an inner life or make it a matter of brain states, a sort of efficient causality to behaviour. Relying on Simone Weil’s distinction between “the language of the market place and the language of the nuptial chamber,” it distinguishes, as she did, between levels of value. The inner life is a life of dealing with values that demand some kind of personal and intimate response.

Philosophical Investigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2, pp. 142-157.

Simone Weil’s Phenomenology of the Body

Lissa McCullough read

Abstract: Major thinkers of the twentieth-century (Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Whitehead) explored the conditions for the possibility of perception, language, and thought, and Merleau-Ponty in particular addressed the physi- cal body as a condition of existing and being situated in the world. Although French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) has not been recognized as belonging in this stream of philosophical history, this article seeks to dem- onstrate that Weil was a pioneering phenomenologist of the body; for remarkably like Merleau-Ponty—yet more than a decade before him in the early 1930s—Simone Weil’s thinking centered on the foundational role of the body in structuring thought and ordering the world. The body is the first and primary orderer of experience for Weil: it grasps relations intuitively, pre-linguistically, and mediates action and thought. Weil’s body-thinking reconfigures the basis of thinking itself, positing that bodily movement is the factor sine qua non that enables ordered spatial-temporal perception, a perception on which the most abstract reaches of language and thought depend.

Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 2 (2012): pp. 195–218