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rfmcdonaldI picked up Simone Weil's Lectures on Philosophy (Cambridge UP: 1978) out of sheer surprise. The book is unique among Weil's oeuvre in that strictly speaking she did not write Lectures on Philosophy, but rather that they were assembled from the notes taken by a student of hers, one Anne Reynaud-Guérithault, while Weil was a teacher at Roanne, in southern France.
The book appealed to me for three reasons. Firstly, in preserving Weil's various lectures as thoroughly as she did, Reynaud-Guérithault's work left for future readers an indirect impression of Weil's personality, notoriously honest even at great personal cost. Secondly, the fine detail evident in her notetaking reminded me of the detail in my own notetaking, in five of my six years at the undergraduate level and in my year at Queen's. Thirdly, and lastly, I was interested in an overview of Western philosophy as it was known in the 1930s by one of the world's best philosophers.
I'm grateful that I own this book. Alas, I haven't yet sat down to systematically read it. I hope that I will sooner rather than later; I'd hate to think that I acquired this title out of a silly desire for trivia better satisfied by a good biography.
She taught me at the girls' secondary school at Roanne during the school year 1933-4. Our class was a small one and had a family atmosphere about it: housed apart from the main school building in a little summer house almost lost in the school grounds, we made our first acquaintance with great thoughts in an atmosphere of complete independence. When the weather was good we had our lessons under the shade of a fine cedar tree, and sometimes they became a search for the solution to a problem in geometry, or a friendly conversation (24).
The book appealed to me for three reasons. Firstly, in preserving Weil's various lectures as thoroughly as she did, Reynaud-Guérithault's work left for future readers an indirect impression of Weil's personality, notoriously honest even at great personal cost. Secondly, the fine detail evident in her notetaking reminded me of the detail in my own notetaking, in five of my six years at the undergraduate level and in my year at Queen's. Thirdly, and lastly, I was interested in an overview of Western philosophy as it was known in the 1930s by one of the world's best philosophers.
I'm grateful that I own this book. Alas, I haven't yet sat down to systematically read it. I hope that I will sooner rather than later; I'd hate to think that I acquired this title out of a silly desire for trivia better satisfied by a good biography.
