The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil

The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil

Author: E. Jane Doering

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13:

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In this book, a group of renowned international scholars seek to discern the ways in which Simone Weil was indebted to Plato, and how her provocative readings of his work offer challenges to contemporary philosophy, theology, and spirituality. This is the first book in twenty years to systematically investigate Weil's Christian Platonism. The opening essays explore what actually constitutes Weil's Platonism. Louis Dupre addresses the Platonic and Gnostic elements of her thought with respect to her negative theology, and the Christian Platonism of her positive theology as found in her reflections on beauty and the Good. degree to which her teacher Alain influenced her Platonism. Michael Ross contends that Weil's interest in Plato is in ethical Platonism. Essays by Robert Chenavier and by Patrick Patterson and Lawrence Schmidt consider the importance of matter and materialism in Weil's Platonism and argue that it is key to understanding her political thought. A middle group of essays addresses more classically metaphysical themes in Weil's thought. Vance G. Morgan examines her use of Greek mathematics. Florence de Lussy analyzes Weil's distinctive, mystical Platonic reflections on Being in the last notebooks from Marseilles. Emmauel Gabellieri discusses Weil's metaxology, that is, the mediation and relatedness of Being, shown in her speculative thought. set of essays considers Weil's relevance for contemporary spirituality and moral theology. Cyril O'Regan examines her thinking on violence and evil. Eric Springsted looks at the conceptual links that exist between Weil and Augustine. Finally, David Tracy contends that Weil is the foremost predecessor of recent attempts to reunite the mystical and prophetic. Drawing together some of the top Weil scholars in the world, this collection offers important new insights into her thought, and will be appreciated by philosophers and theologians.


The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil

The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil

Author: Lissa McCullough

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-07-23

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0857736795

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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.


Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks

Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks

Author: Simone Weil

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-28

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1000964957

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Simone Weil (1909–1943) is one of the most brilliant and unorthodox religious and philosophical minds of the twentieth century. She was also a political activist, worked in the Renault car factory in France in the 1930s and fought briefly as an anarchist in the Spanish Civil War, before her tragic early death in England at the age of thirty-four. Her work spans an astonishing variety of subjects, from ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity to oppression, political freedom and French national identity. Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks sees Weil apply her unique and piercing intellect to early Greek thought, where she finds fundamental precursors to Christian religious ideas. She argues, provocatively, that concepts fundamental to Christianity such as incarnation, redemption, suffering and resurrection are Greek as well as Christian and that there is much we can learn, spiritually and philosophically, from their entwinement. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Christopher Hamilton.


Simone Weil, Attention to the Real

Simone Weil, Attention to the Real

Author: Robert Chenavier

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780268023737

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In Simone Weil Robert Chenavier explores the work of Simone Weil and demonstrates how she brought together spiritual life and the human struggle for solidarity.


Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century

Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century

Author: Eric O. Springsted

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2021-04-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0268200238

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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.


Weaving the World

Weaving the World

Author: Vance G. Morgan

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13:

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An overview of Simone Weil's writings on science and mathematics which opens the door to dialogue between philosophy, art, and religion


Gravity and Grace

Gravity and Grace

Author: Simone Weil

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780415290012

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On the fiftieth anniversary of the first English edition, this Routledge Classics edition offers the English reader the complete text of this landmark work for the first time ever.


Simone Weil and Theology

Simone Weil and Theology

Author: A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0567424308

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Simone Weil - philosopher, religious thinker, mystic, social/political activist - is notoriously difficult to categorize, since her life and writings challenge traditional academic boundaries. As many scholars have recognized, she set out few, if any, systematic theories, especially when it came to religious ideas. In this book, A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone illuminate the ways in which Weil stands outside Western theological tradition by her use of paradox to resist the clamoring for greater degrees of certainty. Beyond a facile fallibilism, Simone Weil's ideas about the super-natural, love, Christianity, and spiritual action, and indeed, her seeming endorsement of a sort of atheism, detachment, foolishness, and passivity, begin to unravel old assumptions about what it is to encounter the divine.


Christian Platonism

Christian Platonism

Author: Alexander J. B. Hampton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-17

Total Pages: 875

ISBN-13: 1108676472

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Platonism has played a central role in Christianity and is essential to a deep understanding of the Christian theological tradition. At times, Platonism has constituted an essential philosophical and theological resource, furnishing Christianity with an intellectual framework that has played a key role in its early development, and in subsequent periods of renewal. Alternatively, it has been considered a compromising influence, conflicting with the faith's revelatory foundations and distorting its inherent message. In both cases the fundamental importance of Platonism, as a force which Christianity defined itself by and against, is clear. Written by an international team of scholars, this landmark volume examines the history of Christian Platonism from antiquity to the present day, covers key concepts, and engages issues such as the environment, natural science and materialism.