Download or read book Simone Weil s Philosophy of Culture written by Richard H. Bell and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1993-03-04 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an excellent treatment, by fourteen distinguished scholars, of some of the central strands in the philosophy of Simone Weil.
Download or read book Simone Weil for the Twenty First Century written by Eric O. Springsted and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Need for Roots written by Simone Weil and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed by Andre Gide as the patron saint of all outsiders, Simone Weil's short life was ample testimony to her beliefs. In 1942 she fled France along with her family, going firstly to America. She then moved back to London in order to work with de Gaulle. Published posthumously The Need for Roots was a direct result of this collaboration. Its purpose was to help rebuild France after the war. In this, her most famous book, Weil reflects on the importance of religious and political social structures in the life of the individual. She wrote that one of the basic obligations we have as human beings is to not let another suffer from hunger. Equally as important, however, is our duty towards our community: we may have declared various human rights, but we have overlooked the obligations and this has left us self-righteous and rootless. She could easily have been issuing a direct warning to us today, the citizens of Century 21.
Download or read book The Subversive Simone Weil written by Robert Zaretsky and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-04-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known as the “patron saint of all outsiders,” Simone Weil (1909–43) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance. Though Weil published little during her life, after her death, thanks largely to the efforts of Albert Camus, hundreds of pages of her manuscripts were published to critical and popular acclaim. While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions—the rigorous rationalist who also had her own brand of Catholic mysticism; the revolutionary with a soft spot for anarchism yet who believed in the hierarchy of labor; and the humanitarian who emphasized human needs and obligations over human rights. Reflecting on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, The Subversive Simone Weil honors the complexity of Weil’s thought and speaks to why it matters and continues to fascinate readers today.
Download or read book Simone Weil an Anthology written by Simone Weil and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a philosopher, theologian, political activist, and mystic whose work endures among the greatest spiritual thinking in human history. Born and educated in Paris, she was devoted to advocating for disenfranchised citizens around the world. Called the 'saint of all outsiders' by Andre Gide, Weil's compassion for the plight of the working class and the armed forces fueled her enlightened treatises and existential inquiries.
Download or read book Spirit Nature and Community written by Diogenes Allen and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers the main aspects of Simone Weil's thought, drawing on her life where it is relevant for understanding her ideas. It is the fruit of many years engagement with scholars and scholarship on Weil in America, France, and the United Kingdom. The philosophical bases of her social and political thought, of her analysis of the natural world, and of her spiritual journey, as found in Plato, Epictetus, and Kant are uncovered. The authors are especially concerned with controversial aspects of Weil's life and thought: they offer an additional dimension to her understanding of the supernatural; they correct Rowan Williams' misunderstanding of her account of preferential love; and argue against Thomas Nevin's attempt to marginalize her as another example of Jewish self-hatred. The book also presents and assesses the new evidence for Weil's baptism.
Download or read book Venice Saved written by Simone Weil and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards the end of her life, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-43) was working on a tragedy, Venice Saved. Appearing here in English for the first time, this play explores the realisation of Weil's own thoughts on tragedy. A figure of affliction, a central theme in Weil's religious metaphysics, the central character offers a unique insight into Weil's broader philosophical interest in truth and justice, and provides a fresh perspective on the wider conception of tragedy itself. The play depicts the plot by a group of Spanish mercenaries to sack Venice in 1618 and how it fails when one conspirator, Jaffier, betrays them to the Venetian authorities, because he feels compassion for the city's beauty. The edition includes notes on the play by the translators as well as introductory material on: the life of Weil; the genesis and purport of the play; Weil and the tragic; the issues raised by translating Venice Saved. With additional suggestions for further reading, the volume opens up an area of interest and research: the literary Weil.
Download or read book Weaving the World written by Vance G. Morgan and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of Simone Weil's writings on science and mathematics which opens the door to dialogue between philosophy, art, and religion
Download or read book Christianity and Culture written by Thomas Stearns Eliot and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1960 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two long essays: "The Idea of a Christian Society" on the direction of religious thought toward criticism of political and economic systems; and "Notes towards the Definition of Culture" on culture, its meaning, and the dangers threatening the legacy of the Western world.
Download or read book The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil written by Lissa McCullough and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Origin of the Political written by Roberto Esposito and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Need for Roots written by Simone Weil and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2023-10-26 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new translation of Simone Weil's best-known work: a political, philosophical and spiritual treatise on what human life could be What do humans require to be truly nourished? Simone Weil, one of the foremost philosophers of the last century, envisaged us all as being bound by unconditional, eternal obligations towards every other human being. In The Need for Roots, her most famous work, she argued that our greatest need was to be rooted: in a community, a place, a shared past and collective future hopes. Written for the Free French movement while she was exiled in London during the Second World War, Weil's visionary combination of philosophy, politics and mysticism is her answer to the question of what life without occupation - and oppression - might be. 'The patron saint of all outsiders' Andre Gide 'The only great spirit of our time' Albert Camus Translated by Ros Schwartz, with an introduction by Kate Kirkpatrick.
Download or read book Simone Weil written by John Hellman and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2010-10-30 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The generation of 1930 in French intellectual life was unique in the gravity of the challenges they faced.” Simone Weil—the brilliant social and political theorist, activist, and spiritual writer—was one of an eminent company in the France of the 1930s who responded to these challenges. In her brief, remarkable life she wrote a host of essays and letters and filled several notebooks with reflections. Hellman’s volume sets out the single world view—with its paradoxes and its logic—which appears behind her disparate writings but which she never lived to set out formally herself. Hellman extracts the key themes in Weil’s writings on Marxism, Hitlerism, factory work, history, and religion, in an effort to examine the seeming contradictions and inconsistencies in her fusion of deep spirituality and commitment to the poor and oppressed and her love-hate relationship with Roman Catholicism and Israel. The result is a synthesis of her thought as a whole, drawn principally from her varied, fragmentary writings, and seen in relation to her life and personality.
Download or read book On the Abolition of All Political Parties written by Simone Weil and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NYRB Classics Original Simone Weil—philosopher, activist, mystic—is one of the most uncompromising of modern spiritual masters. In “On the Abolition of All Political Parties” she challenges the foundation of the modern liberal political order, making an argument that has particular resonance today, when the apathy and anger of the people and the self-serving partisanship of the political class present a threat to democracies all over the world. Dissecting the dynamic of power and propaganda caused by party spirit, the increasing disregard for truth in favor of opinion, and the consequent corruption of education, journalism, and art, Weil forcefully makes the case that a true politics can only begin where party spirit ends. This volume also includes an admiring portrait of Weil by the great poet Czeslaw Milosz and an essay about Weil’s friendship with Albert Camus by the translator Simon Leys.
Download or read book Simone Weil s Apologetic Use of Literature written by Marie Cabaud Meaney and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2007-12-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marie Cabaud Meaney looks at Simone Weil's Christological interpretations of the Sophoclean Antigone and Electra, the Iliad and Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. Apart from her article on the Iliad, Weil's interpretations are not widely known, probably because they are fragmentary and boldly twist the classics, sometimes even contradicting their literal meaning. Meaney argues that Weil had an apologetic purpose in mind: to the spiritual ills of ideology and fanaticism in World War II she wanted to give a spiritual answer, namely the re-Christianization of Europe to which she (though not baptized herself) wished to contribute in some way. To the intellectual agnostics of her day she intended to show through her interpretations that the texts they cherished so much could only be fully understood in light of Christ; to the Catholics she sought to reveal that Catholicism was much more universal than generally believed, since Greek culture already embodied the Christian spirit - perhaps to a greater extent than the Catholic Church ever had. Despite or perhaps because of this apologetic slant, Weil's readings uncover new layers of these familiar texts: Antigone is a Christological figure, combating Creon's ideology of the State by a folly of love that leads her to a Passion in which she experiences an abandonment similar to that of Christ on the Cross. The Iliad depicts a world as yet unredeemed, but which traces objectively the reign of force to which both oppressors and oppressed are subject. Prometheus Bound becomes the vehicle of her theodicy, in which she shows that suffering only makes sense in light of the Cross. But the pinnacle of the spiritual life is described in Electra which, she believes, reflects a mystical experience - something Weil herself had experienced unexpectedly when 'Christ himself came down and took her' in November 1938. In order to do justice to Weil's readings, Meaney not only traces her apologetic intentions and explains the manner in which she recasts familiar Christian concepts (thereby letting them come alive - something every good apologist should be able to do), but also situates them among standard approaches used by classicists today, thereby showing that her interpretations truly contribute something new.
Download or read book Beyond Power written by Desmond Avery and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Power offers fresh ways to approach the burning political, religious, and scientific issues of our time. It also provides a compelling overview of the work of the great French philosopher Simone Weil, whom Albert Camus saw as "the only great mind of our time" and T. S. ...
Download or read book Oppression and Liberty written by Simone Weil and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this remarkable work, Weil analyses the causes of oppression, its mechanisms and forms, and questions revolutionary responses while presenting a prophetic view of a way forward.
