Emerging from thought-provoking discussions and correspondence Simone Weil had with the Reverend Father Perrin, this classic collection of essays contains her most profound meditations on the relationship of human life to the realm of the transcendant.An enlightening introduction by Leslie Fiedler examines Weil's extraordinary roles as a philosophy teacher turned mystic. "One of the most neglected resources of our century ", Waiting for God will continue to influence spiritual and political thought for centuries to come.

Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the priest to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals.

In the reported, experiment participants hit a ball to aim at the vertex of a Müller–Lyer configuration. This configuration either remained stable, changed its shaft length or the orientation of the tails during movement execution. A significant illusion bias was observed in all perturbation conditions, but not in the stationary condition. The illusion bias emerged for perturbations shortly after movement onset and for perturbations during execution, the latter of which allowed only a minimum of time for making adjustments . These (...) findings indicate that allocentric information is exploited for online control when people make rapid adjustments in response to a sudden change in the environment and not when people guide their limb movements to interact with a stable environment. (shrink)

Introducing the Selected Works of Simone Weil Some of Simone Weil's most important thinking was done through the medium of her notebooks. She used them in several inter-related ways. First, she used them to note things she had read and was researching. Far more often, they were workbooks where she worked through her ideas. Many of the ideas in her completed essays can first be found in her notebooks, and thus the notebooks are invaluable for adding context and (...) nuance along with a sense of development to the reading of those later essays. Finally, her notebooks simply contain Weil's aphoristic writing at its best in its most striking presentation. For that reason alone, the last two notebooks, which she wrote while in New York and London in 1942-43, published in French as "La Connaissance surnaturel" have been read as books of great wisdom. This volume also includes her first notebook from the year 1934, not long after her time in the factory and its subject matter reflects this period in her life. (shrink)

Epigenetic and transcriptional variability contribute to the vast diversity of cellular and organismal phenotypes and are key in human health and disease. In this review, we describe different types, sources, and determinants of epigenetic and transcriptional variability, enabling cells and organisms to adapt and evolve to a changing environment. We highlight the latest research and hypotheses on how chromatin structure and the epigenome influence gene expression variability. Further, we provide an overview of challenges in the analysis of biological variability. An (...) improved understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying epigenetic and transcriptional variability, at both the intra- and inter-individual level, provides great opportunity for disease prevention, better therapeutic approaches, and personalized medicine. Epigenetic and transcriptional variability mediate phenotypic plasticity, enabling adaptation to changing environments. In this review, we describe the sources of inter- and intra-individual variability and discuss epigenetic regulators of gene expression variability, including DNA methylation and chromatin structure. Understanding these molecular mechanisms will improve therapeutic approaches and personalized medicine. (shrink)

In this article we discuss what are the implications for improving the design of corporate ethics programs, if we focus on the moral motivation accounts offered by main ethical theories. Virtue ethics, deontological ethics and utilitarianism offer different criteria of judgment to face moral dilemmas: Aristotle's virtues of character, Kant's categorical imperative, and Mill's greatest happiness principle are, respectively, their criteria to answer the question "What is the right thing to do?" We look at ethical theories from a different perspective: (...) the question we ask is "Why should I do the right thing?" In other words, we deal with the problem of moral motivation, and we examine the different rationale the main ethical theories provide. We then point out the relation between moral motivation and the concept of rationality in the different approaches - is acting morally seen as an expression of rational behavior? Our analysis of moral motivation provides a useful framework to improve the understanding of the relationships between formal and informal elements of corporate ethics programs, emphasizing the importance of the latter, often overlooked in compliance-focused programs. We conclude by suggesting that the concept of moral imagination can provide a unifying approach to enhance the effectiveness of corporate ethics programs, by providing an intangible asset that supports the implementation of their formal components into management decision making. (shrink)

In today’s world of rapid changes and increasing complexity, understanding and enhancing creativity is of critical importance. Studies investigating EEG correlates of creativity linked power in the alpha frequency band to creativity, and alpha-power has been interpreted as reflecting attention on internal mental representations and inhibition of external sensory input. Thus far, however, there is no direct evidence for the idea that internally directed attention facilitates creativity. The aim of the current study was to experimentally investigate the relationship between eye-closure—a (...) simple and effective means to stimulate internally directed attention—and creativity. Moreover, to test whether the potential beneficial effect of eye-closure is specific for creativity, or whether it improves general cognitive functioning, the current study tested the effect of eye-closure on creativity and on working memory (WM). Participants completed four tasks to measure divergent and convergent creativity (Adapted Alternative Uses (AAU) Test, Remote Associates Test (RAT), Sentence Construction Test, and Word Construction Test), and one task to measure WM (Digit Span Test). For each task, participants had to perform two versions, one version with eyes open and one version with eyes closed. Eye-closure facilitated creative performance on the classical divergent and convergent creativity tasks (AAU Test and RAT). No effect of eye-closure was observed on the WM task. These findings provide a novel and easily applicable means to enhance divergent and convergent creativity through eye-closure. (shrink)

Simone Weil's Leçons de Philosophie are derived from a course she taught at the lyce;e for girls at Roanne in 1933-4. Anne Reynaud-Gue;rithault was a pupil in the class; her notes are not a verbatim record but are a very full and, as far as one can judge, faithful rendering, often catching the unmistakable tone of Simone Weil's voice as well as the force and the directness of her thought. The lectures form a good general introduction to philosophy, (...) ranging widely over problems about perception, mind, language, reasoning and problems in moral and political philosophy too. Her method of presentation is a characteristic combination of abstract argument, personal experience and literary or historical reference. Peter Winch points out in his introduction to the book some of the more systematic connections in her philosophical work (and between this philosophical work and her other concerns), and makes a number of suggestive comparisons between Simone Weil and Wittgenstein. The translation is by Hugh Price from the Plon edition of 1959. Dr Price has added some notes to explain references in the text that might be unfamiliar to English speaking students beginning philosophy. (shrink)

Constitutional reform has been an important means to push populist authoritarian agendas in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Venezuela. The embrace of constitutional means and rhetoric in pursuit of these agendas has led to the growing recognition of ‘populist constitutionalism’ as a contemporary political phenomenon. In all four examples mentioned above, democracy, popular sovereignty and direct plebiscitary appeal to the people is the rhetorical and justificatory framework for constitutional reform. This, I worry, gives democracy a bad name and reinforces the widespread (...) suspicion that citizens should not be directly involved in constitutional reform as popular participation can lead to dangerous majoritarianism and is easily manipulated by elite actors seeking to weaken constitutional checks and balances. But the problem, I argue, is not inherent in citizen’s participation in constitutional reform. In contrast to populist constitutionalism, I develop an idea of deliberative constitutionalism in which citizens can participate in constitution-making and reform without hijacking constitutionalism for majoritarian, nationalist or anti-pluralist ends. Deliberative constitutionalism as I understand it has four features: a Habermasian co-originality thesis that articulates the interdependence of democracy and liberalism mediated by a conception of discourse; a proceduralized idea of popular sovereignty that reduces the tension between appeal to the people and respect for pluralism; the centrality of the public sphere over the voting booth as the cradle of democracy; institutional innovations intended to include citizens in constitutional reform but avoid majoritarian and populist pathologies. (shrink)

In Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks , Simone Weil discusses precursors to Christian religious ideas which can be found in ancient Greek mythology, literature and philosophy. She looks at evidence of "Christian" feelings in Greek literature, notably in Electra, Orestes, and Antigone , and in the Iliad , going on to examine God in Plato, and divine love in creation, as seen by the ancient Greeks.

Recent evidence suggests that consciousness of encoding is not necessary for the rapid formation of new semantic associations. We investigated whether unconsciously formed associations are as semantically precise as would be expected for associations formed with consciousness of encoding during episodic memory formation. Pairs of faces and written occupations were presented subliminally for unconscious associative encoding. Five minutes later, the same faces were presented suprathreshold for the cued unconscious retrieval of face-occupation associations. Retrieval instructions required participants to classify the presented (...) individuals according to their putative regularity of income, length of education, and creativity value of occupational activity. The three instructions yielded more classifications consistent with a person’s occupation if the person had been subliminally presented with his written occupation versus a meaningless word . This suggests that consciousness is not necessary to encode, long-term store, and retrieve semantically precise associations between primarily unrelated items. (shrink)

Today’s exponential advancement of information and communication technologies is reconfiguring participatory urban development practices. The use of digital technology implies new forms of decentralised governance, collaborative knowledge production, and social activism. The digital transformation has the potential to overcome shortcomings in citizen participation, make participatory processes more deliberative, and enable collaborative approaches for making cities. While digital tools such as digital mapping, e‐participation platforms, location‐based games, and social media offer new opportunities for the various actors and may act as a (...) catalyst for renegotiating urban space and collective goods, digitalisation can also perpetuate or even attenuate existing inequalities and exclusion. This editorial introduces the thematic issue “Citizen Participation, Digital Agency, and Urban Development” which focuses on the trajectories and (dis)continuities of citizen participation through digitalisation and elaborates this with examples from Europe and Asia on how the digital transformation impacts, challenges, or reproduces hegemonic power relations in urban development. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present trust as a meta-emotion, such that it is an emotion that precedes first-order emotions. It examines how trust can be considered a meta-emotion by establishing criteria for identifying trust as a meta-emotion. How trust plays out differently in aesthetic and ordinary contexts can provide another mode for investigating meta-emotions. The article illustrates how it is possible to recognize these meta-emotions in narratives. Finally, it presents one of the aims of trust, sharing knowledge (...) between agents, when someone who provides testimony shares knowledge in an epistemic trust process with others. It shows a relationship construction between subjects and objects thanks to the trust, a meta-emotion that represents emotional ties between subjects to achieve another emotion. (shrink)

While discourse and deliberation cannot replace voting, bargaining, or compromise, Chambers argues, it is important to maintain a background moral conversation in which to anchor other activities.

The complexity of current social and environmental grand challenges generates many conflicts and tensions at the individual, organization and/or systems levels. Paradox theory has emerged as a promising way to approach such a complexity of corporate sustainability going beyond the instrumental business-case perspective and achieving superior sustainability performance. However, the fuzziness in the empirical use of the concept of “paradox” and the absence of a systems perspective limits its potential. In this paper, we perform a systematic review and content analysis (...) of the empirical literature related to paradox and sustainability, offering a useful guide for researchers who intend to adopt the concept of “paradox” empirically. Our analysis provides a comprehensive account of the uses of the construct - which allows the categorization of the literature into three distinct research streams: 1) paradoxical tensions, 2) paradoxical frame/thinking, and 3) paradoxical actions/strategies - and a comprehensive overview of the findings that emerge in each of the three. Further, by adopting a system perspective, we propose a theoretical framework that considers possible interconnections across the identified paradoxical meanings and different levels of analysis (individual, organizational, systems) and discuss key research gaps emerging. Finally, we reflect on the role a clear notion of paradox can have in supporting business ethics scholars in developing a more “immanent” evaluation of corporate sustainability, overcoming the current instrumental view. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 3, June 2019, Page 1-2.

The pathologies of the democratic public sphere, first articulated by Plato in his attack on rhetoric, have pushed much of deliberative theory out of the mass public and into the study and design of small scale deliberative venues. The move away from the mass public can be seen in a growing split in deliberative theory between theories of democratic deliberation (on the ascendancy) which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives within democracies and theories of deliberative democracy (on the decline) that attempt (...) to tackle the large questions of how the public, or civil society in general, relates to the state. Using rhetoric as the lens through which to view mass democracy, this essay argues that the key to understanding the deliberative potential of the mass public is in the distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary rhetoric. (shrink)

_Gravity and Grace_ shows Weil's religious thoughts and ideas, drawn from many sources - Christian, Jewish, Indian, Greek and Hindu - and focusing on suffering and redemption. It brings the reader face to face with the profoundest levels of existence as Weil explores the relationship of the human condition to the realm of the transcendent.

This paper starts from the presupposition that moral codes often do not suffice to make agents understand their moral responsibility. We will illustrate this statement with a concrete example of engineers who design a truck’s trailer and who do not think traffic safety is part of their responsibility. This opinion clashes with a common supposition that designers in fact should do all that is in their power to ensure safety in traffic. In our opinion this shows the need for a (...) moral philosophy that helps engineers to interpret their responsibility and think more critically about it. For this purpose we will explore the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, which is particularly interesting because he locates the beginning of moral thinking in the daily practice of a profession. This is consistent with the history of moral codes, for codes are also the product of moral reflection by professionals. We will use MacIntyre’s philosophy to (1) explain what is wrong with the designers’ understanding of their responsibility and (2) show a possible way to bring their reflection to a more self-critical level. We will also inspect MacIntyre’s proposal critically. (shrink)

The so-called Paradox of Serious Possibility is usually regarded as showing that the standard axioms of belief revision do not apply to belief sets that are introspectively closed. In this article we argue to the contrary: we suggest a way of dissolving the Paradox of Serious Possibility so that introspective statements are taken to express propositions in the standard sense, which may thus be proper members of belief sets, and accordingly the normal axioms of belief revision apply to them. Instead (...) the paradox is avoided by making explicit, for any occurrence of an introspective modality in the object language, the belief state to which this occurrence refers; this will make it impossible for any doxastic modality to refer to two distinct belief sets within one and the same context of doxastic appraisal. By this move the standard derivation of a contradiction from the theory of belief revision in the presence of introspectively closed belief sets does not go through any more, and indeed the premisses of the Paradox of Serious Possibility become jointly consistent once they are reformulated with our amended introspective modalities only. Additionally, we present a probabilistic version of the Paradox of Serious Possibility which can be avoided in a perfectly analogous manner. (shrink)

Introduction Simone Weil experienced the uprootedness of the twentieth century early and continuously. She was born in Paris in 1909, the second child of ...

A distorted representation of one's own body is a diagnostic criterion and core psychopathology of both anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Despite recent technical advances in research, it is still unknown whether this body image disturbance is characterized by body dissatisfaction and a low ideal weight and/or includes a distorted perception or processing of body size. In this article, we provide an update and meta-analysis of 42 articles summarizing measures and results for body size estimation (BSE) from 926 (...) individuals with AN, 536 individuals with BN and 1920 controls. We replicate findings that individuals with AN and BN overestimate their body size as compared to controls (ES= 0.63). Our meta-regression shows that metric methods (BSE by direct or indirect spatial measures) yield larger effect sizes than depictive methods (BSE by evaluating distorted pictures), and that effect sizes are larger for patients with BN than for patients with AN. To interpret these results, we suggest a revised theoretical framework for BSE that accounts for differences between depictive and metric BSE methods regarding the underlying body representations (conceptual vs. perceptual, implicit vs. explicit). We also discuss clinical implications and argue for the importance of multimethod approaches to investigate body image disturbance. (shrink)

The problem of free will lies at the heart of modern scientific studies of consciousness. Some authors propose that actions are unconsciously initiated and awareness of intention is referred retrospectively to the action after it has been performed [e.g. Aarts, H., Custers, R., & Wegner, D. M. . On the inference of personal authorship: Enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information. Consciousness & Cognition, 14, 439–458]. This contrasts with the common impression that our intentions cause those actions. By combining a (...) stop signal paradigm and an intentional action paradigm we show that participants sometimes indicate to have intentionally initiated an action while reaction time data strongly suggest that they in fact failed to stop the action. In a second experiment we demonstrate that the number of trials in which participants misattributed their awareness of intention varied with the intentional involvement during action planning. Our data support the retrospective account of intentional action. Furthermore, we introduce an experimental approach that objectifies introspective judgments of awareness of intention. (shrink)

_Oppression and Liberty_ is one of Simone Weil's most important books on political theory.Here she discusses political and social oppression, its permanent causes, the way it works and its contemporary forms. Simone Weil's writings on oppression and liberty continue to be as valid and thought-provoking today as they were in her lifetime.

Revelatory insights into the early life and thought of the preeminent French feminist philosopher Dating from her years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, this is the 1926-27 diary of the teenager who would become the famous French philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir. Written years before her first meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, these diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and offer critical insights into her early philosophy and literary works. Presented here for the first (...) time in translation and fully annotated, the diary is completed by essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical and literary significance. The volume represents an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir's independent thinking and influence on the world. (shrink)

According to Kim, events are constituted by objects exemplifying property(ies) at a time. In this paper I wish to defend Kim's theory of events from one source of criticism, extending it by taking into account a number of ideas developed by Davidson. In particular, I shall try to avoid events proliferation – one of the most serious problems in Kim's theory – by using a suggestion Kim himself advances, that is, by taking adverbs and the like to be events' rather (...) than properties' modifiers. Keywords: events, properties, adverbs, modifiers. (shrink)

: In The Varieties of Consciousness, Kriegel argues that it is possible to devise a method to sort out the irreducible primitive phenomenologies that exist. In this paper I argue that his neutrality notwithstanding, Kriegel assumes a form of realism that leaves unresolved many of the conundrums that characterize the debate on consciousness. These problems are evident in the centrality he assigns to introspection and his characterization of cognitive phenomenology. Keywords : Consciousness; Introspection; Realism; Type-identity; Dispositional Properties I primitivi della (...) coscienza e la loro realtà Riassunto : In The Varieties of Consciousness Kriegel sostiene la possibilità di concepire un metodo per mettere ordine tra le esperienze fenomenicamente primitive effettivamente esistenti, ciascuna nella propria irriducibilità rispetto alle altre. In questo testo intendo sostenere che, nonostante la sua neutralità, Kriegel assume una forma di realismo che lascia aperti molti dei problemi che caratterizzano il dibattito sulla coscienza. Questi problemi diventano evidenti sia nella centralità assegnata all’introspezione sia nella caratterizzazione specifica della fenomenologia cognitiva. Parole chiave : Coscienza; Introspezione; Realismo; Identità di tipo; Proprietà disposizionali. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Diana Mutz's individual-level data show that participation and deliberation are often inversely related. This, according to Mutz, undermines many claims made by deliberative-democratic theory. However, a systemic approach to deliberative democracy challenges the significance of this finding. Although it is true that some citizens are political activists not open to hearing the other side and other citizens are less active but more open minded, both types of citizens make equally important and positive contributions to deliberative politics when it is (...) viewed as a system that deploys a division of labor. (shrink)

Kann es das Normale in der Ethik geben, muss Normalität auch dort Berücksichtigung finden, wo mithin einzig Normen regulativen Charakter beanspruchen? Die Arbeit fragt danach, inwieweit Normalität als moralfähige Semantik der Moderne zu verstehen ist. Dabei wird deutlich: Normalität ist der Ethik nicht fremd, sie findet sich vielfach in ethischen Anwendungsdiskursen und kann insbesondere für die Theologische Ethik als moderne Verfeinerung der Natur(rechts)-Semantik aufgefasst werden, die von natural-gegebenen Zweckstrukturen absieht und Moral als Konstruktionsleistung entwirft.

This article examines relationships between civil society and state. It explains that civil society refers to uncoerced associational life distinct from the family and institutions of the state Civil society is also often thought to be distinct from the economy, but their separation is a matter of some dispute. Despite differences in definitional boundaries, contemporary interest in civil society focuses predominantly on associational life rather than market or exchange relations. This article describes the six relationships between civil society and state, (...) and suggests that these relations are not mutually exclusive and they do not necessarily compete with each other. (shrink)

In this article we develop a logical model for automatic extraction of structured metadata. We introduce a new predicate???? – reads ‘extract’ – and a structure???? to syntactically and semantically define metadata extracted with any automatic metadata extraction system. These systems will be considered, in the logical model created, as knowledge extraction agents. In this case KEA taken into consideration is CERMINE, a comprehensive open-source system for extracting structured metadata from scientific articles in a born-digital form.

The type identity theory, according to which types of mental state are identical to types of physical state, fell out of favour for some years but is now being considered with renewed interest. Many philosophers are critically re-examining the arguments which were marshalled against it, finding in the type identity theory both resources to strengthen a comprehensive, physicalistic metaphysics and a useful tool in understanding the relationship between developments in psychology and new results in neuroscience. This volume brings together leading (...) philosophers of mind, whose essays challenge in new ways the standard objections to type identity theory, such as the multiple realizability objection and the modal argument. Other essays show how cognitive science and neuroscience are lending new support to type identity theory and still others provide, extend and improve traditional arguments concerning the theory's explanatory power. (shrink)

This essay reviews contemporary theories of public justification. In particular, it argues that conceptions of public justification and public reason have moved significantly beyond Rawls.