Spirituality

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 Bloomsbury Handbook of Simone Weil

Lissa McCullough, editor read

Lissa McCullough, editor, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Simone Weil (2024):

Exploring the philosophical writings of Simone Weil, this unparalleled reference work documents the key thinkers who influenced her political, philosophical and religious outlook. It also offers a critical analysis of her wide-ranging philosophical concepts through short, accessible essays, showing how they connect throughout her writings to form an organic whole.

After outlining her biography, Part I explores Weil’s boundary-crossing interests in radical politics, science, mathematics, history, and religious phenomena. Part II traces the intellectual history of Weil’s own writings by mapping her most important philosophical influences including Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx. The rich landscape of Weil’s philosophy receives critical consideration in Part III through the distinctive defining terms that tie her body of thinking together: terms such as amor fati, attention, beauty, force, gravity and grace, receive full explication alongside important themes of justice, obedience, compassion, and method as they figure in her work.

A reliable scholarly framework guides readers through Weil’s expansive oeuvre, including bibliographic help with locating Weil’s writings in French and English, alongside an overview of the critical literature. For students, scholars, and lay readers who seek clarifying and comprehensive coverage of Weil’s ideas and writings, this text is an indispensable research tool.

About the Editor

Lissa McCullough is Lecturer in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at California State University. Dr. McCullough’s research centers on modern philosophy of religion and interpretations of modernity. She has taught philosophy at CSUDH since fall 2014, and has previously taught religious studies at Muhlenberg College, Hanover College, and New York University. She completed her PhD at the University of Chicago, master’s degree at Harvard University, and bachelor at University of California Santa Cruz. She is author of The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil (I.B. Tauris, 2014), editor of The Call to Radical Theology by Thomas J. J. Altizer (SUNY, 2012) and Conversations with Paolo Soleri (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012); and coeditor, with Brian Schroeder, of Thinking Through the Death of God (SUNY, 2004). In 2008 she was a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University. She is also guest editor of a special issue on Thomas J. J. Altizer for the peer-reviewed online Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Winter 2019