Kathryn Lawson

This volume is a guide to the legacy of the philosophical work of Jean-Luc Marion. A leading phenomenologist and philosopher of religion, Marion’s work addresses questions on the nature and knowledge of God, love, consciousness, art, psychology, and spirituality. Here, leading Marion scholars explain the development of his key concepts, while critically mining the philosopher’s ideas for relevant implications and applications to contemporary issues in various fields of study, including philosophy, theology, art, psychology and literature. The first volume to cover Marion’s wider corpus, this book opens with an original essay by Marion himself, and goes on to present a comprehensive view of Marion’s ideas. Though largely anchored in philosophy, the essays are interdisciplinary and explore the various questions central to Marion’s work, including the visibility and invisibility of God, the constitutive force of the horizon of consciousness, the gift and givenness, eroticism and love, art and painting, psychology, literature, memory, iconography, and spirituality.

Engaging with Hans-Georg Gadamer and Edith Stein, this article argues that art offers us a glimpse of the interiority of both the artist and the community of connoisseurs who share in a love of art. By tarrying with the other in the artwork, the other becomes enmeshed in the meaning of that work and herself becomes a facet of how art is meaningful and world-making. This process does not claim to know the entirety of the other. Rather, the other, like the artwork, is seen only in part. A trace of the other’s interiority affirms our suspicion of connection to the other but always maintains her mystery and autonomy beyond our totalizing conceptualization. Né d’une collaboration entre Hans-Georg Gadamer et Edith Stein, cet article soutient que l’art nous offre un aperçu authentique de l’intériorité de l’artiste et de la communauté de connaisseurs qui partagent leur amour de l’art. En s’attardant avec l’autre dans l’art, l’autre commence à s’emmêler sur le sens de cet art et il devient eux-mêmes une facette de la richesse de l’art et de la trans-formation du monde. Ce processus ne prétend pas connaître l’autre dans son intégralité. Au contraire, l’autre, tout comme l’art, est vu seulement en partie. Des réminiscences de l’intériorité de l’autre confirment notre suspicion de connexion à l’autre mais préservent toujours son mystère et son autonomie au-delà de notre conceptualisation totalisante.

Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil were two of the most compelling political thinkers of the 20th century who, despite having similar life-experiences, developed radically distinct political philosophies. This unique dialogue between the writings of Arendt and Weil highlights Arendt's secular humanism, her emphasis on heroic action, and her rejection of the moral approach to politics, contrasted starkly with Weil's religious approach, her faith in the power of divine Goodness, and her other-centric ethic of suffering and affliction. The writings here respect the profound differences between Arendt and Weil whilst pulling out the shared preoccupations of power, violence, freedom, resistance, responsibility, attention, aesthetics, and vulnerability. Without shying away from exploring the more difficult concepts in these philosophers' works, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil also aims to pull out the relevance of their writings for contemporary issues.

This book places the philosophy of Simone Weil into conversation with contemporary environmental concerns in the Anthropocene. The book offers a systematic interpretation of Simone Weil, making her ethical philosophy more accessible to non-Weil scholars. Weil's work has been influential in many fields, including politically and theologically-based critiques of social inequalities and suffering, but rarely linked to ecology. Kathryn Lawson argues that Weil's work can be understood as offering a coherent approach with potentially widespread appeal applicable to our ethical relations to much more than just other human beings. She suggests that the process of 'decreation' in Weil is an expansion of the self which might also come to include the surrounding earth and a vast assemblage of others. This allows readers to consider what it means to be human in this time and place, and to contemplate our ethical responsibilities both to other humans and also to the more-than-human world. Ultimately, the book uses Weil's thought to propose a decreative ecological ethics that decenters the human being by cultivating human actions towards an ecological ethics. This book will be useful for Simone Weil scholars and academics, as well as students and researchers interested in environmental ethics in departments of comparative literature, theory and criticism, philosophy, and environmental studies.

A recurrent theme across intellectual and religious explorations, the transmigration of the soul is an ethically loaded proposition. In this essay, I will unpack the ethical imperative of reincarnation in Plato’s Timaeus in contrast to the Bhagavad Gita andthe writings of Swami Vivekananda. Within the frameworks of both the Timaeus and the Gita, I will set out the ontological structure of the world, the ethical role of the individual in the reincarnation process, and the teleological purpose of reincarnation. Ultimately, Platonic reincarnation is not ethically adequate because of its rigid hierarchy and an ultimate goal that remains in an individuated self, whereas reincarnation in the Gita offers a multitude of paths towards enlightenment and the final goal entails an interconnection with all beings. Thus, both the process and the goal lead to two vastly different ethical imperatives, and only the Bhagavad Gita’s seems robust enough to encourage an ethical life.

Engaging with Hans-Georg Gadamer and Edith Stein, this article argues that art offers us a glimpse of the interiority of both the artist and the community of connoisseurs who share in a love of art. By tarrying with the other in the artwork, the other becomes enmeshed in the meaning of that work and herself becomes a facet of how art is meaningful and world-making. This process does not claim to know the entirety of the other. Rather, the other, like the artwork, is seen only in part. A trace of the other’s interiority affirms our suspicion of connection to the other but always maintains her mystery and autonomy beyond our totalizing conceptualization. Né d’une collaboration entre Hans-Georg Gadamer et Edith Stein, cet article soutient que l’art nous offre un aperçu authentique de l’intériorité de l’artiste et de la communauté de connaisseurs qui partagent leur amour de l’art. En s’attardant avec l’autre dans l’art, l’autre commence à s’emmêler sur le sens de cet art et il devient eux-mêmes une facette de la richesse de l’art et de la trans-formation du monde. Ce processus ne prétend pas connaître l’autre dans son intégralité. Au contraire, l’autre, tout comme l’art, est vu seulement en partie. Des réminiscences de l’intériorité de l’autre confirment notre suspicion de connexion à l’autre mais préservent toujours son mystère et son autonomie au-delà de notre conceptualisation totalisante.