We introduce and study a PDL-style logic for reasoning about protocols, or plans, under imperfect information. Our paper touches on a number of issues surrounding the relationship between an agent’s abilities, available choices, and information in an interactive situation. The main question we address is under what circumstances can the agent commit to a protocol or plan, and what can she achieve by doing so?

Loss aversion can occur in riskless and risky choices. We present novel evidence on both in a non-student sample (660 randomly selected customers of a car manufacturer). We measure loss aversion in riskless choice in endowment effect experiments within and between subjects and find similar levels of average loss aversion in both. The subjects of the within study also participate in a simple lottery choice task which arguably measures loss aversion in risky choices. We find substantial heterogeneity in both measures (...) of loss aversion. Loss aversion in riskless choice and loss aversion in risky choice are strongly positively correlated, but on average riskless loss aversion is higher than risky loss aversion. We find that in both choice tasks, loss aversion increases in age, income, and wealth, and decreases in education. Our results provide novel supportive input to the debate about the reality of loss aversion. (shrink)

Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a “living (...) ethics”, described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process. (shrink)

Simon Cushing conducted the following interview with Eric Olson on 1 July 2016.

After more than 15 years of study, the 1/f noise or complex-systems approach to cognitive science has delivered promises of progress, colorful verbiage, and statistical analyses of phenomena whose relevance for cognition remains unclear. What the complex-systems approach has arguably failed to deliver are concrete insights about how people perceive, think, decide, and act. Without formal models that implement the proposed abstract concepts, the complex-systems approach to cognitive science runs the danger of becoming a philosophical exercise in futility. The complex-systems (...) approach can be informative and innovative, but only if it is implemented as a formal model that allows concrete prediction, falsification, and comparison against more traditional approaches. (shrink)

The next generation of Geographic Information Systems is anticipated to automate some of the reasoning required for spatial analysis. An important step in the development of such systems is to gain a better understanding and corresponding modeling practice of when to apply arithmetic operations to quantities. The concept of extensivity plays an essential role in determining when quantities can be aggregated by summing them, and when this is not possible. This is of particular importance to geographic information systems, which serve (...) to quantify phenomena across space and time. However, currently, multiple contrasting definitions of extensivity exist, and none of these suffice for handling the different practical cases occurring in geographic information. As a result, analysts predominantly rely on intuition and ad hoc reasoning to determine whether two quantities are additive. In this paper, we present a novel approach to formalizing the concept of extensivity. Though our notion as such is not restricted to quantifications occurring within geographic information, it is particularly useful for this purpose. Following the idea of spatio-temporal controls by Sinton, we define extensivity as a property of measurements of quantities with respect to a controlling quantity, such that a sum of the latter implies a sum of the former. In our algebraic definition of amounts and other quantities, we do away with some of the constraints that limit the usability of older approaches. By treating extensivity as a relation between amounts and other types of quantities, our definition offers the flexibility to relate a quantity to many domains of interest. We show how this new notion of extensivity can be used to classify the kinds of amounts in various examples of geographic information. (shrink)

Eric Crégheur, Jeffery Aubin, Alice Fanguet, Gavin McDowell, Louis Painchaud, Paul-Hubert Poirier, Simon St-Arnault-Chiasson, Philippe Therrien, Benoît Tissot et Yann Vadnais.

Scholars have debated the role that altruistic considerations play—and should play—in recruitment and decision-making processes for clinical trials. Little empirical data are available to support their various perspectives. We analyzed 140 audiotaped pediatric informed consent sessions, of which 95 (68%) included at least one discussion of how participation in a cancer clinical trial might benefit: 1) the pursuit of scientific knowledge generally; 2) other children with cancer specifically; and 3) “the future” and other vaguely defined recipients. Clinicians initiated most (80%) (...) of these discussions of altruism. The enrollment rate of children in the clinical trial was high (83%) overall, but not higher among children whose parents were involved in an altruism-oriented discussion. These findings suggest that: (1) clinicians invoke a spectrum of altruistic considerations rather than a single monothematic notion of altruism, and (2) the effect of altruistic considerations on subsequent enrollment decisions is marginal. While further research on this topic is warranted, bioethical debate should strive to reflect the diversity of altruistic discourse in clinical research encounters and to place this discourse in the context of other, including nonaltruistic, considerations. (shrink)

The authors focus on four major thematic areas – the reform of church, the reform of theology, the reform of perspective, and the reform of method – which together encompasses the breadth and depth of Cusanus’ own reform initiatives.

Humans can recollect past events in details and/or know that an object, person, or place has been encountered before. During the last two decades, there has been intense debate about how recollection and familiarity are organized in the brain. Here, we propose an integrative memory model which describes the distributed and interactive neurocognitive architecture of representations and operations underlying recollection and familiarity. In this architecture, the subjective experience of recollection and familiarity arises from the interaction between core systems and an (...) attribution system. By integrating principles from current theoretical views about memory functioning, we provide a testable framework to refine the prediction of deficient versus preserved mechanisms in memory-impaired populations. The case of Alzheimer's disease is considered as an example because it entails progressive lesions starting with limited damage to core systems before invading step-by-step most parts of the model-related network. We suggest a chronological scheme of cognitive impairments along the course of AD, where the inaugurating deficit would relate early neurodegeneration of the perirhinal/anterolateral entorhinal cortex to impaired familiarity for items that need to be discriminated as viewpoint-invariant conjunctive entities. The integrative memory model can guide future neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies aiming to understand how such a network allows humans to remember past events, to project into the future, and possibly also to share experiences. (shrink)

The degree of autonomy present in the choices made by individuals with an addiction, notably in the context of research, is unclear and debated. Some have argued that addiction, as it is commonly understood, prevents people from having sufficient decision-making capacity or self-control to engage in choices involving substances to which they have an addiction. Others have criticized this position for being too radical and have counter-argued in favour of the full autonomy of people with an addiction. Aligning ourselves with (...) middle-ground positions between these two extremes, we flesh out an account of voluntary action that makes room for finer-grained analyses than the proposed all-or-nothing stances, which rely on a rather static metaphysical understanding of the nature of the voluntariness of action. In contrast, a dynamic concept of voluntary action better accounts for varying levels of voluntariness of the person with an addiction which takes into consideration internal and external determinants of choice. Accordingly, like other components of autonomous choices such as level of information, voluntariness can fluctuate. Therefore, there are important implications for research and clinical ethics in matters of consent, recruitment, and therapeutic approaches. Overall, our proposal is inspired by a pragmatist understanding of voluntary action, notably with respect to how voluntariness is both informed by actions and experiences that shape one's view of the world. (shrink)

We explore our role as researchers and witnesses in the context of an emerging partnership with the Penelakut Tribe, the aim of which is to locate the unmarked graves of children who died while attending the notorious Kuper Island Indian Residential School on their territory (southwest British Columbia). This relationship is in the process of taking shape, so we focus on understanding conditions for developing trust, and the interactional expertise necessary to work well together, with a good heart. We suggest (...) that, in some respects, this may be usefully understood as a practice of witnessing on several dimensions. (shrink)

Ethics designates a structured process by which important human values and meanings of life are understood and tackled. Therein, the ability to discuss openly and reflect on (aka deliberation) understandings of moral problems, on solutions to these problems, and to explore what a meaningful resolution could amount to is highly valued. However, the indicators of what constitutes a high-quality ethical deliberation remain vague and unclear. This article proposes and develops a pragmatist approach to evaluate the quality of deliberation. Deliberation features (...) three important moments: (1) broadening and deepening the understanding of the situation, (2) envisioning action scenarios, (3) coming to a judgment based on the comparative evaluation of scenarios. In this paper, we propose seven criteria to evaluate ethical deliberations: (1) collaborative diversity, (2) experiential literacy, (3) organization of experiences, (4) reflective capacity to instrumentalize the experiences of others, (5) interactional creativity, (6) openness of agents, (7) quality of the reformulation of scenarios. These criteria are explained and applied to the three moments of deliberation. Based on these criteria, three kinds of outcomes for deliberations are identified and discussed: good ethical deliberations, partial ethical deliberations, bad ethical deliberations. Our proposal will guide researchers and practitioners interested in the evaluation of the quality of ethical deliberations. It provides a reference tool that allows them to identify the possible limitations of a deliberation and to implement actions aimed at correcting these limitations in order to achieve the desired qualitative objectives. (shrink)

Developing countries face numerous barriers to conducting effective and efficient ethics reviews of international collaborative research. In addition to potentially overlooking important scientific and ethical considerations, inadequate or insufficiently trained ethics committees may insist on unwarranted changes to protocols that can impair a study's scientific or ethical validity. Moreover, poorly functioning review systems can impose substantial delays on the commencement of research, which needlessly undermine the development of new interventions for urgent medical needs. In response to these concerns, the Drugs (...) for Neglected Diseases Initiative, an independent nonprofit organization founded by a coalition of public sector and international organizations, developed a mechanism to facilitate more effective and efficient host country ethics review for a study of the use of fexinidazole for the treatment of late stage African Trypanosomiasis. The project involved the implementation of a novel ‘pre-review’ process of ethical oversight, conducted by an ad hoc committee of ethics committee representatives from African and European countries, in collaboration with internationally recognized scientific experts. This article examines the process and outcomes of this collaborative process. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

The integrative memory model formalizes a new conceptualization of memory in which interactions between representations and cognitive operations within large-scale cerebral networks generate subjective memory feelings. Such interactions allow to explain the complexity of memory expressions, such as the existence of multiples sources for familiarity and recollection feelings and the fact that expectations determine how one recognizes previously encountered information.

This book is a readers' companion to Simone Weil's The Need for Roots. It includes comprehensive and illuminating essays from recognized Weil scholars from the United States, Canada, England, France, and Germany, addressing the most pressing historical and contemporary aspects of Weil's thought and striking proposals. These include her substituting obligations for rights as the moral basis of society, her critique of our uprootedness and her proposals for rootedness, her critique of our dangerous understanding of greatness, the importance of work (...) for society, and her critique of modern science. This companion reader relies on the latest and most reliable work on the history of the Weil manuscript as provided by French scholars. It is unique in its thorough examination of the book's issues, which center around a spiritual renewal, first of France, but more broadly of western democracies. It includes a comprehensive introduction to the issues important to understanding The Need for Roots. Also included in the appendices are a new translation of Weil's preliminary study of obligations that was meant as an introduction to her work (but always published separately) as well as a translation of an address by Free French leader Andre Philippe-an address that helped set the moral issues that Weil would come to address. The book is both a scholarly contribution to understanding Weil's book and a striking set of conversations about many of the most pressing contemporary issues surrounding the possibilities of a spiritual and moral renewal of Western norms. The ultimate point of this companion is to stress the importance of Weil's The Need for Roots. In a time of clashing ideologies, politics of identity, and a desire, somehow in all that, to find a path to community and a way of respecting all human beings, The Need for Roots is now, more than ever, a timely book and one that needs careful examination and reflection. (shrink)

Eric Olson argues in The Human Animal that thought-experiments involving body-swapping do not in the end offer any support to psychological continuity theories, nor do they pose any threat to his Biological View. I argue that he is mistaken in at least the second claim.

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

There seems to be an interesting difference between judging someone to be good and judging them to be kind. Both judgements are typically positive, but the latter seems to offer more description of the person: we get a slightly more specific sense of what they are like. Very general evaluative concepts are referred to as thin concepts, whilst more specific ones are termed thick concepts. Examples of the former include good, bad, right and wrong, whilst there are countless examples of (...) the latter: brave, rude, gracious, wicked, sympathetic, mean. Marking this distinction opens up some interesting questions. How do the descriptive and evaluative elements of thick concepts combine? Are these elements separable in the first place? Is there a sharp division between thin and thick concepts? Can we mark interesting further distinctions between how thick ethical concepts work and how their aesthetic and epistemic counterparts work? How, if at all, are thick and thin concepts related to reasons and action?.These questions, and others, touch on some of the deepest philosophical issues about the evaluative and normative. They force us to think hard about the place of the evaluative in a (seemingly) nonevaluative world, and they also raise fascinating issues about how language works.This volume of twelve papers explores the phenomenon of thin and thick concepts. They are accompanied by a large introduction that offers an overview of the current and historic field.Authors: Simon Blackburn, Jonathan Dancy, Timothy Chappell, Matti Eklund, Edward Harcourt and Alan Thomas, Simon Kirchin, Debbie Roberts, Michael Smith, Valerie Tiberius, Pekka Väyrynen Eric Wiland, and Nick Zangwill. (shrink)

This article defends novel approaches to what we are and how we persist. First it is claimed that we have disjunctive persistence conditions: we can persist by way of either biological continuity or psychological continuity. Then it is claimed that we are neither human beings nor persons essentially. Rather, we are essentially bio-psycho-continuers, a concept to be explained along the way. A variety of objections are considered and found wanting.

This article takes up the blurred distinction between performative and constative utterances in an effort to develop a quotidian and idiomatic conception of prayer as perjurious testimony. Focusing on a passage in the recently published Le parjure et le pardon seminars, I argue that a quotidian and idiomatic conception of prayer is one whose function interminably oscillates between constative and performative, rendering the distinction between these two uses of language indiscernible. This oscillation plays not to prayer's detriment, but instead serves (...) as the animating force behind prayer and the impossible ethical desire prayer expresses. The impossibility of a prayer whose desire is rendered perjurious by the state of affairs from which it emerges opens onto a number of political, ethical, and theological concerns that the second half of the paper addresses. By reading Simone Weil's reflections on the ‘Our Father’ in light of Derrida's considerations above, I argue that prayer's impossibility is a condition of possibility for its ability to produce real effects in the world it betrays. (shrink)

There seems to be nearly universal agreement that society cannot do without some form of criminal punishment. At the same time, it is generally acknowledged that punishment, involving as it does the imposition of hardship and suffering, stands in need of justification. What form such a justification should take, however, is a matter of considerable contention, in part because of basic theoretical disagreements on the nature of moral obligation, and in part because of disagreements concerning the nature and purpose of (...) criminal punishment itself.These disagreements have given rise to a number of rival ‘theories’ of punishment - rival accounts of the purposes of punishment and the conditions which justify it. The traditional theories can be broadly categorized as deterrence theories, incapacitation theories, retributive theories, and rehabilitative theories. My purpose here is to contribute to this discussion on punishment by introducing a largely overlooked theory of punishment, one whose outlines can be found in the writings of Simone Wei!, but which has yet to be fully developed and discussed. This theory, which I call the ‘reintegrative theory,’ has, I believe, a number of advantages over more traditional theories of punishment. (shrink)

The chapter offers a philosophical account of the capacity to recognise moral considerations to be used in investigating whether psychopaths are amoral, as opposed to immoral. The author criticizes Simon Baron-Cohen and James Blair et al., who maintain that psychopaths are amoral insofar they lack empathy, for endorsing a sentimentalist account of moral understanding. Moreover, the author criticizes Kant's version of rationalism for assuming an impersonal notion of moral rationality that is unconstrained by specific human features. He offers, instead, an (...) account of moral rationality in the spirit of Philippa Foot's Aristotelian inspired proposal. According to this view, moral rationality is a type of rationality that depends on the capacities for empathy, developing feelings of benevolence and resistance to causing harm. Although some psychopaths are irrational in other ways, the author suggest that central to psychopathy is a failure of moral rationality. (shrink)

The cohabitation theory is a popular solution to the problem of personal fission. It affirms that all the people who result from fission were there cohabiting the pre-fission body all along. Adopting this solution is an uncontroversial move for four-dimensionalists, but is it open to three-dimensionalists too? Some have thought so, but Katherine Hawley, Mark Johnston, and Eric Olson have argued to the contrary. They claim three-dimensionalists simply cannot be cohabitation theorists. In this paper, I explain how they can.

This chapter contains sections titled: Simone Weil: The Philosophical Mystic The Varieties of Religious Experience Mysticism, its Varieties, and its Authority Sam Harris on Spiritual Experience Schleiermacher on the Essence of Religious Experience.

We readily recognize the concept of an inner life as a moral category. We struggle to say what an inner life is, though. This essay examines and rejects naturalistic attempts to either dismiss the idea of an inner life or make it a matter of brain states, a sort of efficient causality to behaviour. Relying on Simone Weil's distinction between “the language of the market place and the language of the nuptial chamber,” it distinguishes, as she did, between levels of (...) value. The inner life is a life of dealing with values that demand some kind of personal and intimate response. (shrink)

In 11 essays (many of which have appeared elsewhere though some only in French, together with new material prepared especially for this volume), the authors cover the main, and some of the more controversial, aspects of Weil's (1909-1943) ...

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

"Anyone interested in Simone Weil will want, and need, to read this superb collection." —Diogenes Allen, Princeton Theological Seminary “These essays—some written by leading specialists in Simone Weil's thought, others by prominent theologians and philosophers of religion—are especially valuable not only for elucidating Weil's reading of Plato but also for showing what one or another form of Christian Platonism can mean for us today.” —James A. Wiseman, O.S.B., Catholic University of America "This remarkable and penetrating collection of essays on Simone (...) Weil's religious philosophy illumines the living intersection between serious metaphysics and ethics. The authors carefully examine this relation that much post-modern reflection has until now only skimmed, but that Weil herself managed to embrace with breathtaking intellectual discipline and self-giving. The book is a bracing testimony to the deep moral consequences of classical ontology and its challenging Christian reorientation." —The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner, Ascension Episcopal Church, Pueblo, Colorado In this book a group of renowned international scholars seek to discern the ways in which Simone Weil was indebted to Plato, and how her provocative readings of his work offer challenges to contemporary philosophy, theology, and spirituality. This is the first book in twenty years to systematically investigate Weil’s Christian Platonism. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Warren Nutter’s The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly in the United States, 1899-1939. This started out as a (1949) doctoral dissertation at The University of Chicago, part of Aaron Director’s Free Market Study. Besides Director, O.H. Brownlee and Milton Friedman were closely involved with supervising it. It was published by The University of Chicago Press in 1951. In the 1950s the book was explicitly understood as belonging to the “Chicago School” (Dow and Abernathy 1963). By articulating the (...) content, context, and reception of Nutter’s monograph, this paper discusses four larger themes. First, I introduce the importance of Kuhnian conceptions of science to the methodological and institutional understanding of economics in the development of a ‘Chicago’ school of economics. I do this in context of previously unpublished Stigler-Kuhn exchange. While Thomas Kuhn was widely read and adopted in the social sciences and humanities in the 1960s and 70s (and thereafter), I argue that at ‘Chicago,’ proto-Kuhnian language can be found going back to the 1940s; in those early days it is partly used to disparage the achievements of economic theorizing as promoted by others. A more self-congratulatory Kuhnian self-understanding of economics as a mature paradigm starts to get adopted around 1955 by George Stigler. One important new claim is that the later Kuhnian language gets adopted in part to divest ‘Chicago’ from its shared roots with Institutionalist economics. So, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the formation of a shared narrative at ‘Chicago.’ Second, I introduce contextual themes from Milton Friedman’s writings in the late 40s and 50s to help us understand the nature of realism at Chicago. Nutter’s dissertation helps in reading and illuminating Milton Friedman’s famous 1953 methodology paper in historical and intellectual context. Third, while this chapter notes some of the political ramifications of Chicago economics, my main aim is to help explain the manner in which Chicago attempted to chart a distinctive methodological course. This methodology has often been described as Marshallian with debts to the large-scale NBER studies. Rather than going over familiar territory, I call attention to the importance of proxies in Nutter’s empirical methodology. It is an unappreciated feature of the inductive, quantitative method that focused on the component structures of the economy that characterizes Chicago’s methodological outlook in this period. I show this by comparing Nutter’s dissertation to work done by Stigler, then at Columbia. We know from Stigler’s correspondence with Friedman that in this period they discussed methodological matters. What is less well known is that Friedman is explicitly credited for Stigler’s methodological insights in Stigler's Five Lectures at LSE. The fifth lecture, “Competition in the United States,” covers similar territory as Nutter’s project. Comparing the work by Stigler and Nutter sheds light on the nature of Chicago methodology as it was being developed away from foundations laid by Frank Knight and Henry Simons in the late 1940s and 1950s and opening up the door to (right wing) social engineering as exemplified by Harberger. I present my analysis through the published critical reception of both works among economists. A fourth reason to focus on Nutter’s dissertation is that it was featured in a Fortune magazine article in January 1952. So, it provides a useful entry into how politically important ‘Chicago’ research was marketed to a wider audience. This connects to issues explored by Phil Mirowski and his students, Rob van Horn and Eddie Nik-kah. So, Nutter’s dissertation can help us see how ‘sponsored’ research looks at ‘Chicago at the time. This is especially important because it has been claimed that Director’s Free Market Study group promoted a change from classically liberal views on monopoly, which condemned labor and employer monopolies, to a more pro-business stance. (shrink)

The Beauty That Saves, a collection of essays by many of the most prominent American and European scholars on Weil, begins with a foreword by well-known writer ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century by Eric O. SpringstedLissa McCulloughSPRINGSTED, Eric O. Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021. xxi + 264 pp. Cloth, $100.00; paper, $35.00This book proposes taking French philosopher Simone Weil as a polestar to inspire and orient thought in the twenty-first century. It collects revised versions of eleven articles and essays published between (...) 1994 and the present, now organized into a whole with three new framing chapters (1, 3, and 14). Not intended as an introduction to Weil's life and work, nor as a study primarily directed to Weil scholars, the book seeks a broader readership that need not be well versed in her thought. Weil is recommended as a model for leading a thoughtful life of action exemplifying integrity, discipline, and the exercise of attention: "[W]ith Weil it is important to understand not only what she thought but how she thought," as in her own intellectual transformations she "moved from a strict disciplining of the mind to a regime of attentiveness." [End Page 160]A condensed three-page biography is provided for orientation to Weil's life before the reader is launched into the book's two parts, the first focused on philosophical and theological themes, the second on social and societal concerns. Springsted notes that these themes profoundly converge in Weil's later work, describing her political thought as a "retheologization of the space in which we dwell... an attempt to think about the natural life of humankind in supernatural terms while keeping in mind that this relation is often mediated and veiled." Theology concerns itself with "the sense that God communicates Himself and His Holiness," and the appropriate response is an opening up of oneself in order to listen further: "This is what mystery is about; it is not something to be solved, it is not a set of facts, but something that keeps giving itself.... This is not only the biblical worldview; ancient Greeks such as Plato had it too." Even as Weil's thinking on good, beauty, and truth is profoundly inspired by Plato's, dating back more than two millennia, her bold originality and gift for synthesis manages to pull this thinking into our late modern, post-Christian, and indeed anti-Platonic world of novel perplexities, demonstrating how powerfully this handful of essential words (God, truth, justice, love, good) can speak in our day. This is the key value that Weil offers: "Unless human thought finds some way of connecting itself to something bigger than itself, something that gives a sense of value (and this is what the world's beauty does), human thought will lose depth and dimensionality."Speaking in his own voice, the author affirms that "how we look at our problems can be very different if we understand that we have eternal obligations and that humans have an eternal destiny." This quest for ultimate value and sacramental order puts Springsted on the path of "searching for a new Saint Benedict," the formation of moral communities that bring thoughtful attention and practical work together in a communal life oriented to the good—though he admits that such value-community formation is difficult in increasingly pluralistic and divided societies. Partly because Weil tended to accent individualism, there is no easy or short route to apply Weil's insights on a communal level, even as she clearly sought to do so in her final book-length essay, The Need for Roots, written in 1943 just before her death at age thirty-four.To read Weil's final essay is to be struck by her prescience concerning the dominant intellectual-spiritual conundrums we face today, almost a century later, which are keenly analyzed by her far-seeing attention: the quandaries of post-colonial oppression and uprootedness, us-versus-them nationalisms, money-value as erosive force, mendacity and propaganda in politics, cultural vacuity and soullessness even in the nominally religious domain. To take Weil as one's polestar is indeed to be guided by a sharply critical, rarely lucid thinker whose rigorous criticism of social, political, and religious domains challenge the spectrum... (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.