Can Israel cope with the immigrant wave from Russia’s war on Ukraine, Jews and non-Jews alike?
Haaretz, March 21, 2022
Recommended
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
Simone Deitz on Simone Weil: Video (circa 1988)
6 letters to Guillaume de Tarde; 1941 and [n.d.]
Selected entries, Archive: Houghton Library, Harvard College
A Philosophy “written for everyone”: From Alain to Simone Weil
Formative Writings: 1929–1941
Dorothy Tuck McFarland & Wilhelmina Van Ness, ed., University of Massachusetts Press
Simone Weil’s Rediscovered Jewish Inspiration
The Forward, (March 30, 2009).
Simone Weil—Selected Essays: 1934–1943
London: Oxford University Press, Richard Rees trans.
The Need for Roots: The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations Towards the Human Being The Need for Roots
French philosopher Simone Weil’s best known work that promotes mindful living and instructs readers how they can once again feel rooted, in a cultural and spiritual sense, to their environment.
A Penguin Classic
One of the foremost French philosophers of the last century, Simone Weil has been described by André Gide as “the patron saint of all outsiders” and by Albert Camus as “the only great spirit of our time.” In this, her most famous work, she diagnoses the malaise at the heart of modern life: uprootedness, from the past and from community. Written towards the end of World War II for the Free French Army, Weil’s work is an indispensable and perpetually intriguing text for readers and students of philosophy everywhere. The book discusses the political, cultural and spiritual currents that ought to be nurtured so that people have access to sources of energy which will help them lead fulfilling, joyful and morally good lives.
Philosophy, out of Bounds: The Method and Mysticism of Simone Weil
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study is exposition on the themes of method and mysticism in the work of Simone Weil. Nearly a decade before the onset of her first mystical experience, Weil developed a method to be rigorously applied in daily philosophical reflection. She outlines this method in her dissertation on Descartes (1929-1930). I examine the question of how Weil applied method to philosophical reflection on her mystical experiences (onset 1938-1939). I analyze Weil’s mystical experiences as a type of transformative experience in L. A. Paul’s strict sense of the term. On Paul’s view, an experience is transformative if it is both epistemically and personally transformative. An experience is epistemically transformative if the only way to know what it is like to have it is to have it yourself. An experience is personally transformative if it changes your point of view, including your core preferences (Paul, 2014).
I present a thought experiment and textual evidence to motivate the claim that Weil’s mystical experiences meet Paul’s conditions for transformative experience. I then propose two epistemological facts that can be revealed by philosophical reflection on mystical experience. First, it is possible to read meaning erroneously in the appearances of things. Second, it is possible to come to hold to the certainty of a conviction for reasons that elude the intellect. My findings suggest that Weil’s late views on philosophy accommodate these two epistemological constraints, thereby demonstrating a possible connection between Weil’s mystical experiences and her mature views on the nature, scope, and proper method of philosophy. However, my preliminary findings also suggest that Weil’s early work on method may have anticipated these epistemological obstacles prior to the onset of her first mystical experience. Thus, further exposition of Weil’s method is needed to support or elucidate the claim (Rozelle-Stone and Davis, 2021) that Weil’s epistemology underwent significant changes because of her mystical experiences.
Carmen Maria Marcous, a Dissertation submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences (2022).
