Selected Essays, 1934-1943 - Paperback

by Simone Weil (Author), Richard Rees (Translator), Eric O. Springsted (Foreword by)

Introducing the Selected Works of Simone Weil Weil's many essays written over her short life cover a very wide range of topics. This important collection contains several that have been long unavailable. There is deep integrity in this diverse collection. Many are directed to social and political topics, written in Weil's distinctive way of commenting on contemporary issues through historical writing. Weil wrote in her great work The Need for Roots that humans beings need roots in the universe; this rootedness comes through their lived history. Often Weil is treated as if she were constantly trying to posit timeless truths, but as these essays make evident, Weil offers to her readers a sense of truth as we discover it and live with it in our concrete historical circumstances. This analogical and historical thinking is particularly clear in the several essays that come from her last days while working for the Free French in London, during which she meditated on the philosophical renewal of France after the war. SELECTED WORKS: First and Last Notebooks: Supernatural Knowledge / ISBN 978-1-4982-3919-6 Seventy Letters: Personal and Intellectual Windows on a Thinker / ISBN 978-1-4982-3920-2 Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political and Moral Writings / ISBN 978-1-4982-3921-9

Author Biography

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the twentieth century's most profound thinkers. In her early years, she was known for her brilliant and biting social commentary, and especially for the year she spent working in three Paris factories. After three profound religious experiences, she did not abandon her work on social problems, but also began to write truly original and penetrating religious and philosophical works that still bear on our times, writings that were only published after her death.