“Simone Weil’s Cartesian Meditations”
Les Etudes Philosophiques, vol. 82, no. 3, pp. 183-205.
Poetry & Philosophy | Mario von der Ruhr’s Interview with Marjorie Perloff
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
From Italy — Liliana Cavani’s Cinema of Fraternitas: An interview about her never-produced movie on the life of Simone Weil
A Declaration of Duties Toward Humankind: A Critical Companion to Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots
Contributors
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Robert Chenavier
- Ronald KL Collins
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Julie Daigle
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Emmanuel Gabellieri
- Simone Kotva
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Lissa McCullough
- Mario von der Ruhr
- Lawrence Schmidt
- Eric Springsted
Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press (2023)
Attending: An Ethical Art
Attending – patient contemplation focused on a particular being – is a central ethical activity that has not been recognized by any of the main moral systems in the European philosophical tradition. That tradition has imagined that the moral agent is primarily a problem solver and world changer when what might be needed most is a witness.
Moral theory has been agonized by dualism – motivation is analyzed into beliefs and desires, descriptions of facts and dissatisfactions with them, while action is represented as an effort to lessen dissatisfaction by altering the empirical world. In Attending Warren Heiti traces an alternative genealogy of ethics, drawing from the Platonism recovered by Simone Weil and developed in the work of Iris Murdoch, John McDowell, and Jan Zwicky. According to Weil, virtue is knowledge, knowledge is embodied, and the knower is nested in an ecosystem of relationships. Instead of analyzing and solving theoretical problems, Heiti aims to clarify the terrain by setting up objects of attention from more than one discipline, including not only philosophy but also literature, psychology, film, and visual art.
The traditional picture captures one important type of ethical activity: faced with a moral problem, one looks to a general rule to furnish the solution. But not all problems conform to this model. Heiti offers an alternative: to see what is needed, one attends to the particular being.
Warren Heiti is a Professor of philosophy and liberal studies at Vancouver Island University.
McGill-Queen’s University Press, July 15, 2021
The Reluctant Witness: A Few Recollections of Simone Deitz and Related Matters
Simone Weil and Aristotle
Simone Weil—Selected Essays: 1934–1943
London: Oxford University Press, Richard Rees trans.