EXPeditions - The living library of knowlegde18 Jul 2025

Dana Mills - Simone Weil and the relationship between action and thought

Dana Mills, lecturer in political theory at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, discusses Simone Weil and activism.

About Dana Mills "I'm the Director of International Relations at Gisha and I have taught political theory at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam.

I’ve written books on dance and politics, and especially revolutionary women. Most recently, I wrote a biography of Rosa Luxemburg."

Key Points

• Simone Weil reflected on the relationship between our own actions and the solidarity we might offer others. • In her views on social justice, she shifted the focus from rights to duties: what we owe each other, not what we are owed. • Her concept of attention was a way to move away from the ego and accept that we are only part of something larger than us.

Simone Weil was a Jewish French thinker, theologian, philosopher, activist and organiser who was born in 1909 to a middle-class French family, which gave her a very well-rounded education. Her brother was the mathematician André Weil, who was incredibly famous in his own right.

Simone was an incredibly precocious child. She was very well-read; she read Plato and Pascal as a young girl and fell in love with philosophy, but she was also concerned with the state of the world. From a very young age, she showed a tendency that would last her entire life, which was her ability to identify with people who were suffering. When she was six, she heard that people were starving in France and did not have access to food, so she refused to have sugar in her tea as an act of solidarity.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(100)

The resurgence of civic duties | Simon Reid-Henry

Civic duties are essentially the ways in which citizens agree to abide by the rules and to contribute to the life of a national society. About Simon Reid-Henry "I am a research professor at the Peace ...

16 Mar 14min

What is "prejudice" ? | Jessie Munton

I think prejudice is best conceptualized as a phenomenon that can be supported by a whole range of mental states that will include beliefs, habits, emotions, and also attentional dispositions. About J...

12 Mar 16min

Global Public Investment | Simon Reid-Henry

The world today is overburdened with challenges that supersede the boundaries of nation states, and therefore of national governments, to address on their own. About Simon Reid-Henry "I am a research ...

9 Mar 18min

On ignorance and forgetting | Jessie Munton

I'm interested in the beliefs that we're not forming, the evidence that we're not attending to or using, the belief states that perhaps we form. What I think of as negative epistemology is the project...

5 Mar 19min

The empire of democracy | Simon Reid-Henry

"How do we understand, as it were, our era of democracy, which I argue began really as recently as the 1970s from previous eras, and what is it that is fundamentally at the core of the democracy we li...

2 Mar 19min

The life of the mind | Jessie Munton

On the one hand, we have that sense of really close identification with our minds. On the other hand, we're often surprised at the ways in which they operate. About Jessie Munton "I'm an Associate P...

26 Feb 19min

Volcanoes and the origins of life | Tamsin Mather

We don't really understand how life got going on this planet. There are various candidates for where the first molecules of life might have evolved, and some of those candidates are deeply volcanic. A...

23 Feb 18min

The origin myth of the modern West | Naoíse Mac Sweeney

We in the modern West still look back to ancient Greece as our imagined origin. We're still obsessed with ancient Greece. About Naoise Mac Sweeney "I'm Professor of Greek Archaeology at the Universit...

19 Feb 14min