Simone Weil and the Intellect of Grace: An Introduction - Softcover

Henry Le Roy Finch

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826413609 ISBN 13: 9780826413604

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001

Synopsis

As a thinker, mystic and social critic, Simone Weil is one of the most extraordinary figures of the 20th century. She was a Marxist who experienced the relations of power between producing and ruling classes first hand as a field and factory worker. She was an internationalist who felt that the fall of Paris was a 'great day for Indo-China', and yet she wanted to fight for France. Camus called her social writings 'more penetrating and more prophetic than anything since Marx.' What comes through strongly in this book are Weil's power of analysis and criticism, her love of truth and hunger for justice, her commitment to non-violence, and, most of all, her regard for everyone and everything marginalized or excluded by orthodoxies and establishments, whether colonized people or heresy.

About this title

About the Author

Henry Leroy Finch taught philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College for twenty years and at Hunter College for sixteen years. He was the author of three books on Ludwig Wittgenstein and edited the papers of Eric Gutkind. He was one of the founders of the American Weil Society in 1970. He died in 1998.Martin Andiç is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Review

"For the astute student of Weil's understandings and writings, this text will be most helpful. For the person who has never been introduced to the thoughts, works, and beliefs of Weil...it would serve well as a reference resource."
—Anna Marie Kane, S.SJ, Catholic Library World, December 2001
"In this collection of essays, Finch treats the whole range of Weil's thought with incisiveness and originality....Finch's book is well-suited for those who are already familiar with Weil and who wish to see her thought examined along somewhat different lines than usual."—Religious Studies Review

"Understands Simone Weil more perfectly than most among the scores of writers in English who have tried to interpret her thought in the past thirty years. Finch...masterfully recounts with transparency what he sees in her work. The reader experiences one important philosopher, Finch, reading another, Simone Weil. The reader is rewarded by this over and over." —Richard H. Bell, The Journal of Religion, November 2001
"An exceptionally good addition to the growing scholarship concerned with the life and contribution of Weil. Finch's attention to Weil's religious thought proves to be thoroughgoing, perhaps because his academic commitments included in the teaching of courses in the history of religions as well as philosophy. His erudition in these religious traditions assures a close and convincing presentation of Weil as a religious thinker of and for the world." —Clare B. Fischer, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, March 2002

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0826413609
• ISBN 13: 9780826413604
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 190
• Editor: Martin Andic