Simone Weil (Author)
Simone Weil (1909-43) was a French political activist, mystic and a
singular figure in French philosophy. She studied at the elite cole
Normale Superieure, obtained her agregation (teaching diploma) in
philosophy in 1931, worked at Renault from 1934 to 1935, enlisted
in the International Brigades in 1936 and worked as a farm labourer
in 1941. She left France in 1942 for New York and then London,
where she worked for General de Gaulle's Free French movement. Most
of her works, published posthumously, consist of some notebooks and
a collection of religious essays. They include, in English, Waiting
for God (1951), Gravity and Grace (1952), The Need for Roots
(1952), Notebooks (two volumes, 1956), Oppression and Liberty
(1958) and Selected Essays, 1934-1943 (1962).
Kate Kirkpatrick (Introducer)
Kate Kirkpatrick is Fellow in Philosophy at Regent's Park College,
University of Oxford. She is the author of several books and
articles on twentieth-century French philosophy, including Sartre
on Sin- Between Being and Nothingness (Oxford University Press,
2017), Sartre and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2017), and the
internationally acclaimed biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming
Beauvoir- A Life (Bloomsbury, 2019).
A masterpiece … Today it retains an eerie prescience. Looking to
the past, Weil spoke to future generations who would feel, as she
did, that history is a trap we only half understand … luminous
*TLS*
One of the most important writings of a unique, flawed and
controversial genius, this book warns that modern societies will
only be able to resist fascism by a wholesale spring-cleaning of
our political imagination in the light of spiritual practice. An
excellent, lucid and readable new translation
*Rowan Williams*
This is one of those books which ought to be studied by the young
before their leisure has been lost and their capacity for thought
destroyed; books the effect of which, we can only hope, will become
apparent in the attitude of mind of another generation
*T. S. Eliot*
The patron saint of all outsiders
*André Gide*
The only great spirit of our time
*Albert Camus*
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