D.K. Levy, Book Review: “A declaration of duties towards humankind”
D.K. Levy, Book Review, Philosophical Investigations (Aug. 2025)
Recommended
Philosophy for Darker Times: An Approach to Simone Weil’s Insights
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:
- “Necessity, “Transparency, and Fragility in Simone Weil’s Conception of Ultimate Reality and Meaning,” Ultimate Reality & Meaning, vol. 22, no. 3 (Sept. 1999), pp. 223-246.
- “The God of Religion and the God of Philosophy Debate Revisited,” Process Studies, vol. 50, no. 1 (2021), pp. 88-106.
- “Intentionalism and God’s Fiction,” Journal of Cultural & Religious Theory, vol. 20, no. 2 (Spring 2021)
XLII Colloquy of the American Weil Society: The Politics of Labour
Interview: The Philosophy of Simone Weil with Eric O. Springsted
Podcast interview with Eric Springsted about his career, his life work on Weil, and his latest book on her, along with comments on Plato, Wittgenstein, St. John of the Cross, and Kierkegaard.
Hermitix (July 7, 2021)
The Ethics of Simone Weil and Ludwig Wittgenstein
This thesis investigates the ethics of Simone Well and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I claim that, for both Weil and Wittgenstein, ethics is not systematic or propositional: it is a discipline of attentiveness. For Well, this attentiveness is expressed through impartial respect for the needs of others. The self, which exists as a fixed point of view, interferes with the impartiality of the attention, and Weil’s idea of decreation, I argue, is a way of freeing thought from a point of view. I trace the continuity of Wittgenstein’s ethical thinking from his early to late work, and argue that, while he later rejects his Tractarian metaphysics and logical atomism, his reverence for the ineffability of value remains consistent.
University of Victoria, Thesis, 2006
Ellul and Weil: Attention as Waiting: Complementary Critiques in an Age of Technique via Simone Weil and Jacques Ellul
Excerpt:
The writings of Simone Weil and Jacques Ellul include sociological, philosophical, and religious themes, and the two intellectuals serve as “bookends” surrounding the postmodern era. The writers were prolific, respectively, during the time between the World Wars (Weil), and the late 20th century’s Information Age (Ellul). They each dealt with the impact of modernity on humans, further exploring the implications of Weber’s definition of moderns as “sensualists without heart and specialists without spirit.”
Weil and Ellul had prescient insights on a contemporary trend, namely an unbridled faith in technology, or what Ellul called “technique,” looming large. Ellul and Weil both present a case for how the method of the technological imagination undermines basic needs and obligations for human beings. Alan Jacobs’ text discusses both Weil and Ellul in this light. For Weil the enemy of education is “technocracy . . . ’evil [dominates] wherever the technical side of things is…sovereign.” For Ellul, observing later in the 20th century, “education no longer has a humanist…value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians.” Combining these reflections from the two authors, postmodernity and techniquelose touch with what Weil calls “attention”—waiting for God (or Platonist transcendent claims of Truth and Goodness), and also to the human other.
The thrust of technique in the contemporary American spheres of social media and education pulls away from critical and reflexive capacities, especially as core values in the liberal arts. These two related spheres of change suggest the unreflective assertion of ideas without in-depth, historical learning, or an ethically-entrenched humanistic approach. Higher education and wider communities of discourse reflect an age of empty speech and the worship of technological innovation and “the newest.” This moves away from the charism of St. Bernard of Chartres who reminds us that “New knowledge is always standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Source: International Jacques Ellul Society (2022) / / An early version of this article was presented at the American Weil Society colloquy in the Spring of 2017 at Villanova University.
Sarah MacMillen is an associate professor at McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts in the Sociology Department at Duquesne University.
The Need for Roots
Ros Schwartz, trans., Knopf (forthcoming 2022).
The Merchant of Distraction: A Review of How to THINK Like Shakespeare
The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil
Madison: WI: University of Wisconsin Press
