Untimely Meditations on the Need for Roots: Imagining a Culture of Human Need in Nietzsche and Simone Weil
Baylor University, Honors Thesis
Weil & Other Thinkers
On the Ethics of Weakness: Simone Weil and Nihilism
This essay appears in Gianni Vattimo, ed., Weak Thought, State University of New York Press, 2013, pp. 111-137.
Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin: Two Paths to the Same Truth
With Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) and Simone Weil (1909-1943), we are confronted with two philosophers who examine events, understand their present, and consider the “disorder” of their time caused by Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism. Their respective works constitute acts of resistance against ideology. Wondering about the “dark times” (Bertolt Brecht), they diagnose a Europe that suffers from a disease that is not without precedent, a disease that affects the spirit, the soul, and a disease that can be grasped by its several symptoms. In order to cure this disease, it is necessary to find remedies, and they both believe two countries in particular offer some hope.
VoegelinView.com, The Eric Voegelin Society publishes VoegelinView in partnership with Louisiana State University’s Eric Voegelin Institute, the University of Wisconsin’s Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy, and Nichollas State University’s Nicholls Foundation.
The Theology of Simone Weil and the Topology of André Weil
Religious Studies in Japan, Vol.1, no. 1, pp. 1-14
Simone Weil’s Phenomenology of the Body
Abstract: Major thinkers of the twentieth-century (Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Whitehead) explored the conditions for the possibility of perception, language, and thought, and Merleau-Ponty in particular addressed the physi- cal body as a condition of existing and being situated in the world. Although French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) has not been recognized as belonging in this stream of philosophical history, this article seeks to dem- onstrate that Weil was a pioneering phenomenologist of the body; for remarkably like Merleau-Ponty—yet more than a decade before him in the early 1930s—Simone Weil’s thinking centered on the foundational role of the body in structuring thought and ordering the world. The body is the first and primary orderer of experience for Weil: it grasps relations intuitively, pre-linguistically, and mediates action and thought. Weil’s body-thinking reconfigures the basis of thinking itself, positing that bodily movement is the factor sine qua non that enables ordered spatial-temporal perception, a perception on which the most abstract reaches of language and thought depend.
Comparative and Continental Philosophy, vol. 4, no. 2 (2012): pp. 195–218
The Saint & the Hero: Iris Murdoch & Simone Weil
Sofia de Melo Araujo & Fatima Vieira, eds., Iris Murdoch: Philosopher Meets Novelist (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp. 103-116.
Nihilism and Transcendence in Samuel Beckett and Simone Weil
The problems of nihilism and absurdism as presented in the works of Samuel Beckett which presuppose a bleak view of the world without transcendence are effectively solved by turning to Simone Weil’s philosophy which appropriates key absurdist premises in its transcendence-centered interpretation of knowledge and experience. Weil’s rereading of religion appropriates important criticisms from existentialist-absurdist writers like Beckett and critics of traditional religion. It is possible to transcend the absurdist impasse by turning to Weil. Notebooks of Weil are here read as providing important insights to answer absurdist nihilist pessimist vision.
Teresian Journal of English Studies, vol. 3, no. 1 (2011), pp. 21-27
Loving Wisdom with Dewey and Simone Weil
Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 41-55
The Concept of Mystery and the Value of Philosophy in the Later Wittgenstein
Alasdair MacIntyre has urged a project for philosophers of faith to do philosophy in such a way as to address the deeper human concerns underlying philosophy’s basic questions. This essay examines where Wittgenstein’s later philosophy makes a contribution to that sort of project. It notes the importance of his doctrine of “meaning as use” for thinking philosophically about religion; it is centered in the life-world of religious people. But it also deals with issues arising from Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy should be a sort of conceptual therapy that undoes confusion and leaves everything as it is, i.e., his defactoism. It argues that there is an underlying sense of value. This changes from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. In the latter, he ultimately shows a commitment to a philosophical value of openness and willingness to transform one’s mind by the discovery of what is given.
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 85.4 (Fall, 2011) 547-563.
Decreation, Art, and a Passage of Diasporic Soul: Reading Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Pomegranate Offering with Simone Weil
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion, vol. 1, no. 9, pp. 1-24
