• Philosophy and Literature "In Situation"

  Yvanka Raynova (Axia Academic Publishers, 2020-12-01)

  Editorial to the second issue of Labyrinth 2020, which is dedicated to the general theme "Philosophy, Art(theory), and Literature."
• Dostojewskijs Gottesfrage aus der Sicht von Jean-Paul Sartre und Slavoj Žižek

  Yvanka Raynova (Axia Academic Publishers, 2021-09-01)

  One of the most discussed problems in Dostoyevsky's work, at least in Western philosophy and especially in Existentialism, concerns the question of God, which has been received and interpreted in very different ways. This editorial introduction will refer to two readings - that of Sartre and that of Slavoj Žižek. The aim is to show that these two interpretations, although at first sight seemingly antithetical, are not mutually exclusive but complementary.  
• On the Ethical and Cultural Perspectives of Translation

  Yvanka Raynova (Axia Academic Publishers, 2019-12-01)

  Editorial to Vol. 21, No. 2 of Labyrinth 2019, which is dedicated to the general theme "Translating Philosophy and the Humanities: Contemporary Problems and Debates." 
• Philosophy and Art(history) Reconsidered

  Yvanka Raynova (Axia Academic Publishers, 2020-08-01)

  Editorial introduction to the first issue of Labyrinth 2020, which is dedicated to the general theme "Philosophy, Art(theory), and Literature."
• On the Relationship between Values, Rights, Norms and Feelings

  Yvanka Raynova (Axia Academic Publishers, 2019-09-01)

  Editorial to the special issue is dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Axiological Research and its journal Labyrinth. 
• Zwischen Verdacht und Vertrauen: Das "dialektische Spiel" von Paul Ricœurs Hermeneutik

  Yvanka Raynova (Axia Academic Publishers, 2024-01-01)

  Too often associated with suspicion rather than trust, Ricœur's hermeneutics is understood by many primarily as a critical endeavor. In this way, the fragile balance that he is trying to maintain between the two approaches is ignored. The objective of the following study is, by means of Ricoeur's "dialectical game of suspicion and trust", to elucidate the complexity of his hermeneutics and to demonstrate that trust is as pivotal as suspicion. At the difference of some authors who maintain that trust and suspicion are opposed, even mutually exclusive approaches of two kinds of hermeneutics, it will be shown that Ricoeur has developed a single hermeneutics which encompasses both approaches and explores them on different levels (epistemological, anthropological, ethical, sociopolitical). In the limited number of contributions dedicated to Ricoeur's concept of trust, these different levels are frequently conflated, whereby the relationship between religious belief and trust/mistrust is completely ignored. Consequently, the divergent perspectives of his early and late philosophical work, as well as certain discontinuities, are overlooked. Therefore, this study places a central emphasis on the neglected religious level of suspicion and trust. 
• Se transporter dans l'autre" : une théorie weilienne de l’empathie ?

  Blandine Delanoy (Axia Academic Publishers, 2024-01-01)

  Defined as the ability to understand and share others' feelings and suffering, empathy seems to come naturally to mind when we consider Simone Weil's life and works. If this concept doesn't explicitly appear in her writings, "pity", "sympathy" and "compassion" are pervasive: the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how these notions converge on the contemporary understanding of "empathy". Since the turn of the century, this concept has known such a development that it has become difficult to clearly identify its object, and to appreciate its ethical value. To study Simone Weil's works from the angle of empathy offers both a new approach of the concept, and a very relevant point of view to put in light the great continuity between all the fields of the philosopher's thought. Our main hypothesis is that the weilian theory of empathy is based on the idea of "transposition", a process that allows someone to transport himself into another person, and from the natural to the supernatural dimension. It is in this last dimension that Simone Weil can found intersubjectivity, and solve the ethical problem of empathy: the right distance between the Self and the Other.
• “God does not algebra”: Simone Weil’s search for a supernatural reformulation of mathematics

  Roberto Paura (Axia Academic Publishers, 2024-01-01)

  The article offers an analysis of Simone Weil's philosophy of mathematics. Weil's reflection starts from a critique of Bourbaki's programme, led by her brother André: the "mechanical attention" Bourbaki considered an advantage of their treatment of mathematics was for her responsible for the incomprehensibility of modern algebra, and even a cause of alien-ation and social oppression. On the contrary, she developed her pivotal concept of 'atten-tion' with the aim of approaching mathematical problems in order to make "progress in another more mysterious dimension". In the Pythagorean 'crisis of incommensurables', Weil saw the possibility of defining the relationships between things in terms that are not exclusively numerical. This implies drawing an analogy between mathematical relation-ships and God's relationship with mankind (logos), the basis of a 'supernatural' reformu-lation of the entire scientific understanding of the world. The consequence is a critique of machinism and the possibility to contrast algorithmic reason with a "supernatural reason".
• Primal Screams: The Infantile Cry in Simone Weil

  Elinore Darzi (Axia Academic Publishers, 2024-01-01)

  The main thesis of this essay is that non-linguistic infantile cries towards the nondefinable constitute, for Simone Weil, the essence of the human. The author begins by surveying, for the first time, Weil’s depiction of the infant’s cry as a scream of an infinite desire towards nothing definite. In the second part, in which the author analyzes the infantile cry introduced in Weil’s later writings this desire, it will be presented as fundamental to being. The infantile cry expresses mutely a desire for the indescribable good. Since it is cried from birth till death, its designation as infantile is revealed to indicate not one’s age but one’s nonlinguistic essence. While recent scholarship emphasized the importance of silence in Weil’s thought, no attention had been given to the significance of the ineffable to her philosophy. By studying the infant and infantile cry, this essay will show how the inarticulate desire towards the unattainable comprises the truth of being.
• From Inattentiveness Towards Moral Failures: Acknowledging Simone Weil in Iris Murdoch’s Literary Writings

  Camille Braune (Axia Academic Publishers, 2024-01-01)

  Simone Weil's ideas proved fundamental for Iris Murdoch, opening up a difficult path of thought for one rooted in the British philosophical tradition in the 1950s (Sim 1985, Bok 2005, Lovibond 2011a, Panizza 2022a, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022). Grasping the Weilian-inspired moral theory of attention sketched by Iris Murdoch is a prerequisite for comprehending the development of her moral ideas (Panizza 2015, Broackes 2012) and the form they may take in her literary writings (Griffin 1993, Morgan 2006). This paper argues that we can read an expression of Simone Weil in Iris Murdoch's novels which articulate her notions of grace and gravity, but also convey the Weilian insights that shape Murdoch's moral perfectionism. It investigates three of Murdoch's well-known male protagonists, i.e., Bradley Pearson, Charles Arrowby and Hilary Burde, so as to comprehend how their moral failures relate to a defective implementation of the concepts of love and attention as theorised by Simone Weil as leading to goodness. Hence, it offers a new examination of the way in which the Murdochian literary staging of inattention as a cause of moral deficiency reveals its Weilian-based ethics of attention.
• La réception surréaliste de Simone Weil. Simone Weil et Georges Bataille

  Jean-Marc Ghitti (Axia Academic Publishers, 2024-01-01)

  Despite her hostility to surrealism, Simone Weil received a paradoxical reception in the work and thought of Georges Bataille. From this point onwards she has attracted the interest of psychoanalysis up to the present day. After their meeting and exchanges at the beginning of the 1930s, Bataille wrote a novel in which he created a portrait of Simone Weil and asks, through her, questions which served to develop and enrich the next stages of his theoretical constructions. This pathway to progress through reference to Simone Weil has often gone unnoticed. However, it deserves to be reconstituted because it brings a disturbing light that Weil would not have approved but that could help us to renew our understanding of her personality and her work.
• Simone Weil and the need for obedience: political, religious, and ethical dimensions

  Sasha Lawson-Frost (Axia Academic Publishers, 2024-01-01)

  This essay explores the development of Simone Weil's conception of obedience across religious, political, and ethical contexts. By bringing together these strands of Weil's thought, it aims to illuminate some important connections in her treatment of obedience throughout these diverse topics. The author argues that Weil's political treatment of obedience is deeply influenced by ideas in Christian thought, and that this account is situated within an understanding of obedience in the natural world which is itself ethically loaded. Hence it is suggested that Weil's account of obedience has something to offer philosophy today: namely, a conception of obedience which recognises the practical and ethical need for obeying others, but which is distinct from the mere submission to power.
• Une idée du miracle : Approche et définition chez Simone Weil, continuité et expression artistique chez Godard

  Vincent Delcorte (Axia Academic Publishers, 2024-01-01)
• Simone Weil et les dimensions mystiques de la nourriture

  Nejra Salihbegovic (Axia Academic Publishers, 2024-01-01)

  This article aims to examine the mystical meanings of food in the texts Gravity and Grace, Waiting for God, and First and Last Notebooks by the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943). The main questions posed over the course of this study are as follows: How does Weil interpret food in her mystical texts? What relationship do her ideas have with her context of the Second World War, with Judaism, with her body? Are biomedical understandings of behavior, such as anorexia nervosa, applicable to Weil? The methodology will involve an in-depth reading of the three texts mentioned above, sketching the key theories of decreation and affliction. The main thesis of the paper is that food has an irremediably ambiguous status in Weil, marking both the degrading subjection of the human being to the earthly laws of necessity and gravity, and paradoxically, a path to salvation, where, through the spiritual transformation of decreation, the human being eats and is eaten by God. The author argues that this quasi-Christian mysticism must first be understood in Weil’s context of the Second World War, and that it also involves a problematic relationship with Judaism. Moreover, this study contends that interpretations utilizing primarily medical frameworks to understand Weil's food deprivation, such as anorexia nervosa, are insufficient. Such pathologization, as will be demonstrated, neglects the complex and often ambiguous mystical, ethical, and ontological meanings that Weil locates in hunger.  
• Simone Weil ou la vérité des fous

  Yvanka Raynova (Axia Academic Publishers, 2023-09-01)

  Editorial of Yvanka B. Raynova to the Special issue "Simone Weil (1909-1943): Receptions and Actuality."
• Like a Fly against a Pane of Glass: Simone Weil in the Context of Contemporary Theories of Suffering

  Eva-Maria Düringer (Axia Academic Publishers, 2023-09-01)

  The last five years have seen a welcome rise in philosophical research on suffering. In this paper I will introduce the main new proposals and point out their respective weak-nesses. All accounts focus on an important aspect of suffering, but each one is too nar-row. I will sketch an account of suffering as being forced to endure the unendurable, based on Simone Weil's writings. I will argue that not only does this account manage to encompass the important aspects of suffering emphasised by current research, but that it much more plausibly brings out the ethical dangers, such as seeking consolations in fabricated narratives of meaning, and the value of suffering, such as enabling the mind to make unfiltered contact with reality.
• Thoughtful Labor. Simone Weil on Vocational Education

  Anouk Zuurmond (Axia Academic Publishers, 2023-09-01)

  The work of Simone Weil is increasingly important in the field of philosophy of education, however, her ideas on schooling have been largely understood from her later, religiously inspired works. This paper argues that this approach does not do justice to the fact that Weil's thinking about education is already present in her earlier works and that her educational ideas were profoundly inspired by her experience as a factory worker. One of the key insights Weil gained whilst working in a factory was the importance of what she refers to as "thoughtful labor". This paper addresses this concept by engaging with the earlier work of Weil on educational philosophy. Furthermore, these ideas are juxtaposed with a German tradition in pedagogical thinking, emerging around the same time, on the notion of Berufsbildung, which indicates a combination of professional, personal and societal formation in vocational training. I argue that Weil shares with this tradition the crucial idea that work can have an educational value, and that it should be integrated into the educational system. However, the tradition of Berufsbildung has been critiqued for its strong tendency to consolidate existing power structures; I suggest that this critique is still valid on current discourses on general formation and Bildung in vocational education. In the final part of this article, I argue that on this point the work of Simone Weil differs from the notion of Berufsbildung, as she stands in a tradition of educational thinkers who remind us of the potential revolutionary character of education.
• L'ennui ouvrier dans la pensée de Simone Weil. Cohérence du matériel et du spirituel

  Judith Bordes (Axia Academic Publishers, 2023-09-01)

  This paper focuses on one aspect of Weil's philosophy of labor, which has not been studied until now: the problem of boredom. In a 1938 article, she defines boredom as the main source of suffering for factory-workers. But shouldn't boredom rather occur during leisure-time, when one has nothing to do? In fact, factory work can lead to boredom, despite its frenetic rhythm and the deep concentration it implies. According Weil, boredom in factory has two main causes: monotony, and the fact that, while working, the workers lose the control over their own time. This correlation of boredom with certain conditions of work is nowadays still relevant, and it concerns modern life not only in the working sphere. It implies a critical approach to the conditions of production in the capitalist era. But it also helps to describe the paradoxical state in which, while being active, one suffers from weariness. At last, it shows the relevance of an exploration of the various aspects of modern alienation through the problematic of time. The interest in the problem of boredom therefore allows to explore two complementary sides of Weil's thought: materialism and religious inspiration.
• Like a Fly against a Pane of Glass: Simone Weil in the Context of Contemporary Theories of Suffering

  Eva-Maria Düringer (Axia Academic Publishers, 2023-09-01)

  The last five years have seen a welcome rise in philosophical research on suffering. In this paper I will introduce the main new proposals and point out their respective weak-nesses. All accounts focus on an important aspect of suffering, but each one is too nar-row. I will sketch an account of suffering as being forced to endure the unendurable, based on Simone Weil's writings. I will argue that not only does this account manage to encompass the important aspects of suffering emphasised by current research, but that it much more plausibly brings out the ethical dangers, such as seeking consolations in fabricated narratives of meaning, and the value of suffering, such as enabling the mind to make unfiltered contact with reality.
• Simone Weils frühes Verständnis des Totalitarismus als existenzielle Bedrohung

  Ulrich Arnswald (Axia Academic Publishers, 2023-09-01)

  Coming from anarchist circles and revolutionary-syndicalist trade unions, Simone Weil initially saw herself as a Marxist and an anarchist, before increasingly becoming their early and extremely pointed critic. From 1933 on, she distanced herself more and more from the syndicalist movement in terms of content, and at the same time she was increasingly skeptical of its politics. She saw in the syndicalists, socialists, and communists no more accurate knowledge of society than in the conservatives or fascists. Moreover, she came to realize that they did not have the necessary means of action to carry out a revolution. In the assertion of the "historical mission of the working class," she saw a phrase that served the functionaries but only further humiliated and betrayed the working class. In this respect, even Marxism was for Weil still the intellectual expression of the bourgeoisie, because even a change in property relations would not have eliminated the oppression of the working class. Until the end of her life, she held that instead a radical change in labor relations was necessary to end the oppression of the working class and its social misery. The article attempts to situate Simone Weil's early disillusionment with syndicalism, socialism, Marxism and Stalinism, as well as her recognition of what was widely labelled totalitarianism in Western societies at the latest after the Second World War, in her writings.

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