Simone Weil (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.95 (712 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1861897987 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 189 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-07-20 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
“Weil’s moral absolutism remains a reproach to Jews who believe they can appropriate Israel’s ethnicity (and perhaps its ethics) but dispense with its holiness code, and to Christians who seek redemption in their own ethnic roots rather than through adoption into the People of God. Although her reasoning led to tragic results, Weil nonetheless did the world a service, and Yourgrau has done a service by explaining her.”
Born in Paris to a cultivated Jewish-French family, Weil excelled at philosophy, and her empathetic political conscience channeled itself into political engagement and activism on behalf of the working class. During her brief lifetime, Weil was a paradox of asceticism and reclusive introversion who also maintained a teaching career and an active participation in politics. In this concise biography, Palle Yourgrau outlines Weil’s influential life and work and demonstrates how she tried to apply philosophy to everyday life. Yourgrau assesses Weil’s controversial critique of Judaism as well as her radical re-imagination of Christianity—following a powerful religious experience in 1937—in light of Plato’s philosophy as a bridge between human suffering and divine perfection. In Simone Weil, Yourgrau provides careful, concise readings of Weil’s work while exploring how Weil has come to be seen as both a modern saint and a bête noir, a Jew accused of having abandoned her own people in their hour of greatest need.. Simone Weil, legendary French philosopher, political activist, and mystic, died in 1943 at a sanatorium in Kent, England, at the age of thirty-four
"Stunningly good" according to Largo. I have just finished this new book, and I can't say enough about it. It is what might be called a "philosophical biography", of the great French thinker Simone Weil. Weil developed a radical and profoundly disturbing picture of the nature of human beings and their place in the world, and Yourgrau's book is, first and foremost, a penetrating philosophical explorat