Weil & Other Thinkers
The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real With Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil
Inside Issue 6: New and Forthcoming 
On Simone Weil and Giotto
Keynote Lecture delivered at the 2022 American Weil Society’s Friday Web Series, April 9, 2022.
Alexander Nemerov Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. His publications include Summoning Pearl Harbor (2017); Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine (2016); Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (2005); and The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (2001). His most recent publication is Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (2021).
Co-sponsored by the American Weil Society and the Snite Museum of Art as part of “Translations of Beauty: Simone Weil and Literature,” XL Colloquy of the American Weil Society
The Reluctant Witness: A Few Recollections of Simone Deitz and Related Matters
Inside Issue 5: New and Forthcoming
A Philosophy “written for everyone”: From Alain to Simone Weil
Nursing in Wartime: Edith Stein and Simone Weil on Empathic Attention
Abstract: Edith Stein and Simone Weil both trained as Red Cross nurses for wartime service. For both philosophers, the activity of a nurse demands empathic attention to the afflicted. Stein envisions herself as an attendant nurse in her memoirs; Weil similarly casts herself in a nurse’s role in her proposal for an elite, sacrificial nurses’ corps. This essay examines the practice of wartime nursing as a school for, and an expression of, their complementary philosophies of human beings seen in their physical, epistemological, and spiritual interrelatedness.
Journal of Continental Philosophy (Feb. 23, 2022)
Ann W. Astell is a professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
Thinking about Judaism: Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil (Italian edition)
Pensare l’ebraismo: Jacques Maritain e Simone Weil (Italian Edition) Kindle Edition (Feb. 2022), Emanuele Pili, University of Perugia
Abstract in translation
Against the backdrop of the Second World War, Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil reflected deeply on the nature and relevance of Judaism. If Maritain imagined an unprecedented relationship with Christianity, reading the (in) fidelity of Israel in a Pauline way, Weil hoped for a purification of the West from inauthentic cultural traditions, of which Judaism participated in large part, in search of those ties that preserve the ‘human.’
Emanuele Pili originally interprets two very different souls but united by a strong sense of political responsibility, which led to a commitment to fight against totalitarianism. The first Italian translation of the bases for a statute of French minorities appears in the appendix; it is is one of the most controversial texts in the entire body of works by Simone Weil.
Investigating “Man’s Relation to Reality”: Peter Winch, the Vanishing Shed and Metaphysics after Wittgenstein
Peter Winch believed that the central task of philosophy was to investigate ‘the force of the concept of reality’ in human practices. This involved creative dialogue with critical metaphysics. In ‘Ceasing to Exist’, Winch considered what it means to judge that something unheard-of has happened. Referring to Wittgenstein, Winch argued that judgments concerning reality must relate our observations to a shared ‘flow of life’. This implies criticism of the form of epistemology associated with metaphysical realism. Just as, according to Wittgenstein, a sentence has no fixed meaning in isolation — an observation does not constitute knowledge outside shared human practices.
Philosophical Investigations, 5 Jan. 2022
