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The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil. Eds. E. Jane Doering & Eric O. Springsted. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Paper. 252 p.
E. Jane Doering's and Eric Springsted's collection of 12 essays analyzes Simone Weil's philosophy, noting her desire for coherent thought. Weil was a talented mathematician and logician. Born to agnostic, Jewish parents, she never read the Torah. Weil studied classical Greek culture, especially Plato's philosophy. As a teen, she taught herself classical Greek, yet she saw Plato as a "mystic," revealing her Gnostic leanings. Louis Dupre recounts Plato's influence in three central theses of Weil's negative theology: Platonic Gnosticism, interpreting creation as an act of divine self-emptying; an extra divine realm of necessity; and Christian Platonism of the theory of beauty as a reflection of God. Plato's doctrine contains for Weil a pre-Christian message of justice and love. Justice is supernatural friendship that results from harmony, the unity of contraries. Michel Narcy points out that Weil is usually critical of Aristotle, but agrees with those who see Platonic "participation" as just another name for the Pythagorean imitation of numbers. Weil relies on Alain's notion that Plato's Ideas are "imaginary." Alain accepted Aristotle's view that Ideas are models, while other things participate in them, which is using poetic metaphors. The Platonic Idea as metaphor preserves it from being a thing, which allows one to attribute to his Idea an immanent intelligibility as "experience." Hence, Weil is a limited Platonist in a strictly philosophical sense, considering the antithesis between wisdom, philosophy, and logic. For Weil, wisdom is the search...