Spirituality

Simone Weil’s Spiritual Critique of Modern Science: An Historical-Critical Assessment

Joseph K. Cosgrove read

Simone Weil is widely recognized today as one of the profound religious thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet while her interpretation of natural science is critical to Weil’s overall understanding of religious faith, her writings on science have received little attention compared with her more overtly theological writings. The present essay, which builds on Vance Morgan’s Weaving the World: Simone Weil on Science, Necessity, and Love (2005), critically examines Weil’s interpretation of the history of science. Weil believed that mathematical science, for the ancient Pythagoreans a mystical expression of the love of God, had in the modern period degenerated into a kind of reification of method that confuses the means of representing nature with nature itself. Beginning with classical (Newtonian) science’s representation of nature as a machine, and even more so with the subsequent assimilation of symbolic algebra as the principal language of mathematical physics, modern science according to Weil trades genuine insight into the order of the world for symbolic manipulation yielding mere predictive success and technological domination of nature. I show that Weil’s expressed desire to revive a Pythagorean scientific approach, inspired by the “mysterious complicity” in nature between brute necessity and love, must be recast in view of the intrinsically symbolic character of modern mathematical science. I argue further that a genuinely mystical attitude toward nature is nascent within symbolic mathematical science itself.

Providence College, Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

Simone Weil’s Apologetic Use of Literature: Her Christological Interpretations of Ancient Greek Texts

Marie Cabaud Meaney

New York: Oxford University Press

Simone Weil: A Sense of God

J. Ranilo B. Hermida read

There is one thread of thought no serious reader of Simone Weil can possibly miss from the variegated tapestry of her thinking. And that is her sense of God, which is almost naturally embedded therein. She unfailingly elevates her every insight to a level that is at once metaphysical or theological. Indeed, Weil considers all human concerns always “situated in the context of our relation to God.” She excludes nothing for she believes that even those practices not readily recognized as religious contribute to our spiritual development and prepare us for loving God. . . .

Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, vol, 9, no. 1, Winter 2006, pp. 127-144

Faith, Belief, and Perspective: Peter Winch’s Philosophy of Religion

Eric Springsted read

Peter Winch’s philosophy of religion is controversial, accused of mere “perspectivism” and fideism, and for avoiding discussion of any existential reference for the object of belief. This essay examines what Winch meant by a “perspective.” It first deals with problems of first-person propositions of belief. For Wittgenstein and Winch belief, and the fact it believes, are inextricably bound together. Thus Winch argues that what is said cannot be divorced from the situation of the sayer; understanding requires making shifts in perspective. Finally, I compare Winch’s use of religious language to Augustine’s doctrine of the “inner word,” arguing that there are important parallels in Winch to pre-Lockean theological understandings of faith.

Philosophical Investigations, vol. 27, no. 4 (Oct. 2004) pp. 345-369.