As a teenager, Simone Weil thought about killing herself. The reason? She could no longer keep up with her older brother André at math. “I didn’t mind having no visible successes,” she later explained ...

In 1957, when Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize in literature in Stockholm, a reporter asked him which writers he felt the closest to. He gave two names: his close friend Rene Char and the ...

The sound of the banalities generally uttered about Simone Weil can already be heard in these few words by Simone de Beauvoir: “A great famine had just struck China, and they told me that Simone Weil ...

Catholic scholars embrace Simone Weil for her Catholic conversion and writings on Christian mysticism. According to Boston College history professor Benjamin Braude, however, the prevailing narrative ...

Reading the writings of Simone Weil (1909-1943) takes my breath away. Her thoughts are always fresh and have the dew upon them. An intellectual is a person for whom the life of the mind is extremely ...

"What response does seeing human suffering demand of us?" This question, which opens the new documentary An Encounter with Simone Weil, couldn't be timelier. From the unfathomable violence in Syria ...

How the French activist and thinker forged a radical new philosophy for an age of war and ideological conflict. By Wolfram Eilenberger “Simone Weil, as I have come to understand, is the only great ...

Philosophers have lives; saints have legends. No miracles are associated with Simone Weil (1909-43), and a glance at reference books on philosophy finds her listed alongside Jean-Paul Sartre and ...

Gray, who as novelist and biographer has illuminated the mystery of human suffering (most recently in At Home with the Marquis de Sade, 1998, a Pulitzer Prize finalist), was the perfect pick to write ...