Causality and purpose of change in Simone Weil's early philosophy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22370/rhv2025iss29.4704Keywords:
change, time, causality, work, purpose, Simone WeilAbstract
In this article we address one of the most important dimensions of Simone Weil's early philosophy (1925 and 1931), which is her conception of time, tracing one of its central problems, namely the oscillation of the young philosopher between Kantian phenomenology, of which she claimed to be an heir, and her own emerging ontological perspective, which, as we shall see, reinterprets the objectivity of natural changes and phenomena from a different ontological standpoint, informed by her understanding of human labor. Indeed, although some of the young Weil's phenomenological reflections reflect that her premises are Kantian, others end up moving away from them to areas that involve certain contradictions and ambiguities that are difficult to assimilate, both for herself and for the interpreter of Weil's early texts. We believe that this is a relevant study, since it was in her youth that Weil took her first steps in the construction of an original epistemology that poses an irreducible tension between the human and subjective component of the knowledge arising from work; and the universal component of the aspiration of science in its quest to capture the objectivity of nature.
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