Weil

In 1946, Éric Weil (1904-1977), heir to the legacy of the Neo-Kantian tradition, student of Ernst Cassirer and friend of Raymond Aron, co-founded the journal Critique, with Georges Bataille. The latter, a philosopher of strict Morality and Politics, was better known in his native country of Germany, and in the United States and Italy, than he was in France, which he nonetheless defended in combat during World War II.His work is a reinterpretation of the entire philosophical tradition in terms of historical man, and deals with the potential for rational discourse in a world threatened by extreme violence (of the sort practiced by totalitarian regimes). It also deals with the relationship between individual freedom and language consistency, in terms of the irreducible diversity of philosophies and difficulty of choosing any one particular mode of thought.In this book, the author strives to show the extreme timeliness of Weil's texts, ranging from Logique de la philosophie (1950), which bases the practice of philosophy on a query about the mind, and participation in the world of action, to Philosophie politique (1956), which places the problems of all modern societies in perspective (the conflict between the State and Society, the need to reconcile social justice with economic efficiency, globalization and the future of national States, and the challenge of defining an international legal framework that would secure peace), to Philosophie morale (1961), which develops ethics appropriate for our active lives.Patrice Canivez, a senior lecturer at the Université de Lille III, France, has published Éduquer le citoyen ? and Eric Weil ou la question du sens.