This in-depth study examines the social, religious, and
philosophical thought of Simone Weil.
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century presents a
comprehensive analysis of Weil's interdisciplinary ...thought,
focusing especially on the depth of its challenge to contemporary
philosophical and religious studies. In a world where little is
seen to have real meaning, Eric O. Springsted presents a critique
of the unfocused nature of postmodern philosophy and argues that
Weil's thought is more significant than ever in showing how the
world in which we live is, in fact, a world of mysteries.
Springsted brings into focus the challenges of Weil's original (and
sometimes surprising) starting points, such as an Augustinian
priority of goodness and love over being and intellect, and the
importance of the Crucifixion. Springsted demonstrates how the
mystical and spiritual aspects of Weil's writings influence her
social thought. For Weil, social and political questions cannot be
separated from the supernatural. For her, rather, the world has a
sacramental quality, such that life in the world is always a matter
of life in God-and life in God, necessarily a way of life in the
world.
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century is not simply
a guide or introduction to Simone Weil. Rather, it is above all an
argument for the importance of Weil's thought in the contemporary
world, showing how she helps us to understand the nature of our
belonging to God (sometimes in very strange and unexpected ways),
the importance of attention and love as the root of both the love
of God and neighbor, the importance of being rooted in culture (and
culture's service to the soul in rooting it in the universe), and
the need for human beings to understand themselves as communal
beings, not as isolated thinkers or willers. It will be essential
reading for scholars of Weil, and will also be of interest to
philosophers and theologians.
In this book Roberto Esposito explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century’s most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer’s Iliad—that ...“great prism through which every gesture has the possibility of becoming public, precisely by being observed by others”— as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, Esposito examines the foundational relation between war and the political.
Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt’s and Weil’s voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, The Origin of the Political traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of Esposito’s notion and practice of “the impolitical.”
In Esposito’s account Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other’s thought, in the shadow of the other’s light,” to “think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, Esposito unravels the West’s illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.
This important new study examines the work of Simone Weil; French mystic, social philosopher, and activist in the French Resistance in the Second World War. Weil's posthumously published works had a ...major influence on French and English social thought. Philosophy for Darker Times relates Weil's insights to specific significant issues in our own time.
Abstract
Attention has often been seen as a selective process in which the mind chooses which already‐formed objects to focus on. However, as Merleau‐Ponty and others have pointed out, this ignores ...the complexity and ambiguity of sensory information and imposes on it a set of already‐formed objects in the world. Rather, attention is a process by which objects in the world are constituted by the perceiving subject. Attention thus involves a process of mutual negotiation with the environment. There are connections between this and the process of
attente
described by Simone Weil, in which the perceiving subject suspends the dominant preoccupations of the ego in order to become more aware of an independent reality. This, in turn, expresses in a more modern idiom what early Christian teachers had to say about the role of attentive looking in the contemplative life.
The French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), a contemporary of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, remains in every way a thinker for our times. She was an outsider, in multiple senses, ...defying the usual religious categories: at once atheistic and religious; mystic and realist; sceptic and believer. She speaks therefore to the complex sensibilities of a rationalist age. Yet despite her continuing relevance, and the attention she attracts from philosophy, cultural studies, feminist studies, spirituality and beyond, Weil's reflections can still be difficult to grasp, since they were expressed in often inscrutable and fragmentary form. Lissa McCullough here offers a reliable guide to the key concepts of Weil's religious philosophy: good and evil, the void, gravity, grace, beauty, suffering and waiting for God. In addressing such distinctively contemporary concerns as depression, loneliness and isolation, and in writing hauntingly of God's voluntary 'nothingness', Weil's existential paradoxes continue to challenge and provoke. This is the first introductory book to show the essential coherence of her enigmatic but remarkable ideas about religion.
This paper argues that the influential French thinker, Simone Weil, has something distinctive and important to offer educational and ethical inquiry. Weil's ethical theory is considered against the ...backdrop of her life and work, and in relation to her broader ontological, epistemological and political position. Pivotal concepts in Weil's philosophy - gravity, decreation and grace - are discussed, and the educational implications of her ideas are explored. The significance of Weil's thought for educationists lies in the unique emphasis she places on the development of attention, a notion elaborated here via the key themes of truth, beauty and love.
The Continuing Legacy of Simone Weil analyzes the core work of Simone Weil and her views on the nature of the human condition, humanity's relationship with God, and the objective state of our world.
