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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)

 

 

The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later

A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone & Lucian Stone

New York: Continuum (preface by Jacques Cabaud)

Simone Weil: Seventy Letters

London: Oxford University Press, Richard Rees trans., reprinted with foreword by Eric Springsted, Wipf and Stock

Simone Weil, a politics of the good for our age

(Conference) watch

Simone Weil (1909-1943) – philosopher, teacher in high schools and for factory workers, social activist, anarchistic-ranks soldier in Spain, manual worker in factories and farms, Résistence member, mystic – never wrote academic articles: the 16 volumes of her writings are an intellectual but personal expression of her social, political and spiritual deliberations and engagement, constituting a corpus of original, sober and subversive thought. Her influence is intensifying along the years, from Albert Camus who first published her posthumously and described her as “the only great spirit of our time”, up to her increasing presence in the words of contemporary politicians. A first Hebrew translation of a collection from her social and political writings is forthcoming in 2018, and in 30-31.10.2018 an international conference will be held at the Open University of Israel campus in Raanana on her thought and its relevance for the society and politics of our age from theoretical, comparative and historical perspectives. The conference will be tri-lingual, in Hebrew, French and English, with simultaneous translation between Hebrew and French.

Participants: Barbara Wolfer, Aviad Heifetz, Frederic Worms, Alexandra Feret, Jean Davienne, E. Jane Doering, Daniel Rosenberg, Pascal David, Denis Charbit, Robert Chenavier, Rita Fulco, and Christine Evans

Open University of Israel campus (Raanana) (2018)