Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil

Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil
Author: Kathryn Lawson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2024-05-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1040021492

This book places the philosophy of Simone Weil into conversation with contemporary environmental concerns in the Anthropocene. The book offers a systematic interpretation of Simone Weil, making her ethical philosophy more accessible to non-Weil scholars. Weil’s work has been influential in many fields, including politically and theologically-based critiques of social inequalities and suffering, but rarely linked to ecology. Kathryn Lawson argues that Weil’s work can be understood as offering a coherent approach with potentially widespread appeal applicable to our ethical relations to much more than just other human beings. She suggests that the process of "decreation" in Weil is an expansion of the self which might also come to include the surrounding earth and a vast assemblage of others. This allows readers to consider what it means to be human in this time and place, and to contemplate our ethical responsibilities both to other humans and also to the more-than-human world. Ultimately, the book uses Weil’s thought to decanter the human being by cultivating human actions towards an ecological ethics. This book will be useful for Simone Weil scholars and academics, as well as students and researchers interested in environmental ethics in departments of comparative literature, theory and criticism, philosophy, and environmental studies.

Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil

Ecological Ethics and the Philosophy of Simone Weil
Author: Kathryn Lawson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024
Genre: Environmental ethics
ISBN: 9781032583266

"This book places the philosophy of Simone Weil into conversation with contemporary environmental concerns in the Anthropocene. The book offers a systematic interpretation of Simone Weil, making her ethical philosophy more accessible to non-Weil scholars. Weil's work has been influential in many fields, including politically and theologically-based critiques of social inequalities and suffering, but rarely linked to ecology. Kathryn Lawson argues that Weil's work can be understood as offering a coherent approach with potentially widespread appeal applicable to our ethical relations to much more than just other human beings. She suggests that the process of 'decreation' in Weil is an expansion of the self which might also come to include the surrounding earth and a vast assemblage of others. This allows readers to consider what it means to be human in this time and place, and to contemplate our ethical responsibilities both to other humans and also to the more-than-human world. Ultimately, the book uses Weil's thought to propose a decreative ecological ethics that decenters the human being by cultivating human actions towards an ecological ethics. This book will be useful for Simone Weil scholars and academics, as well as students and researchers interested in environmental ethics in departments of comparative literature, theory and criticism, philosophy, and environmental studies"--

The Need for Roots

The Need for Roots
Author: Simone Weil
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2020-04-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000082792

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.

The Origin of the Political

The Origin of the Political
Author: Roberto Esposito
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2017-04-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0823276287

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.

Ethical Humans

Ethical Humans
Author: Victor Jeleniewski Seidler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2021-11-29
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1000482774

Ethical Humans questions how philosophy and social theory can help us to engage the everyday moral realities of living, working, loving, learning and dying in new capitalism. It introduces sociology as an art of living and as a formative tradition of embodied radical eco post-humanism. Seeking to embody traditions of philosophy and social theory in everyday ethics, this book validates emotions and feelings as sources of knowledge and shows how the denigration of women has gone hand in hand with the denigration of nature. It queries post-structuralist traditions of anti-humanism that, for all their insights into the fragmentation of identities, often sustain a distinction between nature and culture. The author argues that in a crisis of global warming, we have to learn to listen to our bodies as part of nature and draws on Wittgenstein to shape embodied forms of philosophy and social theory that questions theologies that tacitly continue to shape philosophical traditions. In acknowledging our own vulnerabilities, we question the vision of the autonomous and independent rational self that often remains within the terms of dominant white masculinities. This book offers different modes of self-work, drawing on psychoanalysis and embodied post-analytic psychotherapies as part of a decolonising practice questioning Eurocentric colonising modernity. In doing so it challenges, with Simone Weil, Roman notions of power and greatness that have shaped visions of white supremacy and European colonial power and empire. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental ethics, environmental philosophy, social theory and sociology, ethics and philosophy, cultural studies, future studies, gender studies, post-colonial studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and philosophy and sociology as arts of living.

Effort and Grace

Effort and Grace
Author: Simone Kotva
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2020-06-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350113662

Philosophy and theology have long harboured contradictory views on spiritual practice. While philosophy advocates the therapeutic benefits of daily meditation, the theology of grace promotes an ideal of happiness bestowed with little effort. As such, the historical juxtaposition of effort and grace grounding modern spiritual exercise can be seen as the essential tension between the secular and sacred. In Effort and Grace, Simone Kotva explores an exciting new theory of spiritual endeavour from the tradition of French spiritualist philosophy. Spiritual exercise has largely been studied in relation to ancient philosophy and the Ignatian tradition, yet Kotva's new engagement with its more recent forms has alerted her to an understanding of contemplative practice as rife with critical potential. Here, she offers an interdisciplinary text tracing the narrative of spiritual exertion through the work of seminal French thinkers such as Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, Alain (Émile Chartier), Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze. Her findings allow both secular philosophers and theologians to understand how the spiritual life can participate in the contemporary philosophical conversation.

Breached Horizons

Breached Horizons
Author: Rachel Bath
Publisher:
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2019-05-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781786610911

This volume offers a comprehensive guide to the extensive corpus of Jean-Luc Marion's ideas, including a discussion of contemporary French phenomenology and critical appraisal of Marion's ideas by leading scholars in the field. The contributors apply Marion's thought to various fields of study, including theology, art, literature and psychology.

Agamben's Philosophical Lineage

Agamben's Philosophical Lineage
Author: Adam Kotsko
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2018-11-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1474423663

Istanbul's AemberlitaAY HamamA provides a case study for the cultural, social and economic functions of Turkish bathhouses over time

Positive Duties to Wild Animals

Positive Duties to Wild Animals
Author: Kyle Johannsen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2024-12-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1040229875

This book further develops the interventionist literature on wild animal suffering using different theoretical frameworks, including some that have never previously been used to ground our positive duties to wild animals. Though we’ve always known that the wild is a nasty place where predators lethally attack prey, only recently have most animal ethicists come to realize that most wild animals fail to flourish. In fact, what we know about wild animal reproduction suggests that the majority of sentient beings born into the world may not even live lives worth living. It’s not unreasonable for one to initially respond to the above with a sense of depressed resignation, but a growing number of ethicists believe that we both can and should intervene. The purpose of this book is to further develop the interventionist literature by bringing together philosophers who agree that we have significant duties to help wild animals, but who use different theoretical frameworks, or who disagree about the details, e.g., about the reasons that ground our obligations to help wild animals, about how those obligations should be classified, about the content of our obligations, about the means we should use to fulfill our obligations, etc. This book will be an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers and students of animal ethics, animal welfare, environmental ethics, philosophy, and sustainability. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Ethics, Policy & Environment.