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Simone Weil's “Human Personality”: Between the Personal and the Impersonal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2005

Christopher Hamilton
Affiliation:
King's College, London

Extract

Simone Weil's essay “La personne et le sacré,” known in English as “Human Personality,” is a remarkable piece of philosophy that has not, I think, received as much attention as it deserves among analytic philosophers. And when it has been discussed by such philosophers, they have not always gotten to the root of its oddities and peculiar interest. Granted, it is in some ways extremely difficult to translate Weil's approach to her themes into the kind of discourse characteristic of present-day Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Also, those who are attracted by Weil's writings tend to read her on her own terms, which leaves one with a sense that the hardest questions have not been put to her, and that the difficulties of her work have not been fully brought to the surface. Be that as it may, I wish here to take seriously the central claims that Weil makes and to explore them from an analytic perspective, not least because “Human Personality” contains, in nuce, most of the themes that preoccupied Weil.

Type
ARTICLES
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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