Recommended

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)

The Importance of Attention in Morality: An Exploration of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophy

Silvia Panizza read

This thesis explores the role of attention in morality as presented by Iris Murdoch. The aim is to offer a clear and detailed understanding of Murdoch’s concept of attention, its metaphysical presuppositions and its implications for morality, and, if Murdoch’s view as developed here is found to be plausible, to suggest how attention can be considered to play an important role in morality. The moral concept of attention presented in this work involves particular epistemic attitudes and faculties that are meant to enable the subject to apprehend moral reality and thus achieve correct moral understanding and moral responses.

The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part (Chapters 1 and 2), clarifies Murdoch’s metaphysical picture on which the idea of attention is grounded. The metaphysics involves a dual commitment to value as both existing in reality and as a transcendental condition. While the two ideas appear incompatible, I suggest a framework against which Murdoch’s claim that an evaluat ive consciousness apprehends a value external to itself might be understood. The second part introduces Murdoch’s moral psychology, and explores how the faculties, attitudes and character traits related to attention are involved in moral understanding (Chapters 3 and 4). The two parts come together in Chapter 5, which focuses on how the exercise of attention can be understood as enabling moral perception. The last part (Chapters 6 and 7) continues the moral psychological exploration of attention, by focusing on the self, viewed both as interference and as indispensable means in attaining moral understanding.

The analysis of Murdoch’s thought is conducted through close readings of her work, discussions of the secondary literature, as well as by clarifying and developing key points through readings of Simone Weil, from whom Murdoch derives the idea of attention.

Ph.D. dissertation, University of East Anglia School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies Department of Philosophy, September 2015

Related:

— Iris Murdoch, “‘Waiting on God’: A Radio Talk on Simone Weil,” Iris Murdoch Review, (2017), pp. 9-16, preface by Justin Broackes, (BBC broadcast, Oct.18, 1951, 7.40 p.m. on the Third Programme)

— Simone Weil, Venice Saved, ed. & trans. by Silvia Panizza & Phillip Wilson,  Bloomsbury Academic, 2019

Suffering Divine Things: Simone Weil and Jewish Mysticism

Rico Sneller read

To what extent can man suffer God? The verb ‘suffering’ as such is ambiguous, for it can either mean bearing ‘pain’ (‘to suffer from’), or tolerating something. In other words, ‘suffering’ can be both intransitive and transitive. Whereas the first meaning seems to be predominantly passive, the second, while still fairly passive, is more active. In both cases, however, a kind of interpenetration of both ‘parties’ is implied: that which I am suffering is somehow inside me, whether I want it or not. Anyhow, the question, ‘can man suffer God?’, turns out to be in need of clarification before it can be answered at all.

In this contribution, I will study a Jewish author who ‘exchanged’ her Judaism for Christianity: Simone Weil (1909-1943). I will try to see what she writes about suffering God, it being my hypothesis that suffering God is a more adequate notion than the vaguer ‘experiencing’ God. Suffering God, or rather, suffering divine things might be a notion accounting for the conflation of ethical, spiritual, and global dimensions. I will try to shed some light on Simone Weil’s views by relating them to some motives from the Jewish mystical tradition: ‘cosmoeroticism’, kawanna and tsimtsum.

Mahmoud Masaeli, ed., Spirituality and Global Ethics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2017), pp. 9-26

The Famous Book She Never Wrote: The story of Simone Weil’s “Gravity and Grace”

Ronald Collins read

Gravity and Grace is one of her most-read works. First published in France in 1947, La Pésanteur et la grâce was received as a manifesto of faith for those searching for God’s presence in the black holes of an indifferent universe. Despite the claim on the book’s cover and title page, it is not a book that Weil wrote. True, its words were hers. But the conception, selection, organization, and rearrangement of those words into 39 compressed chapters with aphorism-like appeal were not her work product.

Washington Independent Review of  Books, April 16, 2020

The Concept of Mystery and the Value of Philosophy in the Later Wittgenstein

Eric Springsted read

Alasdair MacIntyre has urged a project for philosophers of faith to do philosophy in such a way as to address the deeper human concerns underlying philosophy’s basic questions. This essay examines where Wittgenstein’s later philosophy makes a contribution to that sort of project. It notes the importance of his doctrine of “meaning as use” for thinking philosophically about religion; it is centered in the life-world of religious people. But it also deals with issues arising from Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy should be a sort of conceptual therapy that undoes confusion and leaves everything as it is, i.e., his defactoism. It argues that there is an underlying sense of value. This changes from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. In the latter, he ultimately shows a commitment to a philosophical value of openness and willingness to transform one’s mind by the discovery of what is given.

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 85.4 (Fall, 2011) 547-563.

Nursing in Wartime: Edith Stein and Simone Weil on Empathic Attention

Ann W. Astell read

Abstract: Edith Stein and Simone Weil both trained as Red Cross nurses for wartime service. For both philosophers, the activity of a nurse demands empathic attention to the afflicted. Stein envisions herself as an attendant nurse in her memoirs; Weil similarly casts herself in a nurse’s role in her proposal for an elite, sacrificial nurses’ corps. This essay examines the practice of wartime nursing as a school for, and an expression of, their complementary philosophies of human beings seen in their physical, epistemological, and spiritual interrelatedness.

Journal of Continental Philosophy (Feb. 23, 2022)

Ann W. Astell is a professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.