Madoc Cairns

Nov 13, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Madoc Cairns |Suki Finn |Richard Whatmore |Jonathan Egid

A revolutionary who critiqued Marx; a Christian who refused baptism; a Jew who held Jewishness in contempt: Simone Weil was a creature of contradictions. For Adrienne Rich, Annie Dillard, Mary Gordon and the array of poets studied in Cynthia R. Wallace’s The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil, Weil’s contraries analogize our own. Reading Weil, we meet someone caught within our conflicts and limitations; and someone who, somehow, transcends them.

Nov 13, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Suki Finn |Madoc Cairns |Richard Whatmore |Jonathan Egid

Despite its title, Regan Penaluna’s How to Think Like A Woman is very much not a how-to guide. Instead it is a combination of memoir, philosophical exegesis and the biographies of several philosophers, structured somewhat chronologically around the author’s changing relationship with philosophy itself. As for gendered thought, Penaluna provides a few hints at what “thinking like a woman” might entail. On page 120 we read: “the epistemic state of many a thinking woman is one of self-doubt”.