Recommended

Reading Simone Weil in East London – Dr Anna Rowlands

Anna Rowlands watch

This presentation draws on empirical research conducted with Jesuit Refugee Service in London. It is grounded in the experience of refugees living in destitution in the UK asylum process into dialogue with the work of Simone Weil. These experiences are connected to work which began in dialogue with St Augustine and Hannah Arendt on time and temporality in the context of refugee experiences.

Our seminar programme offers students, scholars, and interested visitors an opportunity to learn more about aspects of Christian history and contemporary Christianity. The seminars are held in conjunction with the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University.

Find out more at www.cccw.cam.ac.uk.

Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide Webinar – 9th December 2021

Simone Weil: An Intellectual Biography

Gabriella Fiori

Joseph R. Berrigan, trans., University of Georgia Press

“Affliction, Revolt, and Love: A Conversation Between Camus and Weil”

Sophie Bourgault

in Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre, ed., The Originality and Complexity of Albert Camus’s Writings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 125-142

What is la force in Simone Weil’s Iliad?

D.K. Levy read

Weil’s essay on Homer’s Iliad contains a philosophical analysis of la force that divides it into two phenomena with one metaphysical ground. Her analysis is a corrective to misunderstandings of force as something that can be possessed. The first half of my elaboration of Weil’s analysis is devoted to the phenomena she identifies in relation to la force, which I call might. In the second half, I elaborate the varieties of misunderstanding of la force. First, might is an illusion sustained by the shared belief of those in submission to might. Second, forces, i.e. the material forces on which weaponry depends, cannot be possessed. Third, what lies behind material forces is necessity, a third meaning of la force, which functions as a superordinate or ultimate force to which everyone and everything is subject. Understanding the last of these is the corrective that Weil means to present.

Philosophical Investigations, vol. 43, nos. 1-2, pp. 8-18.