A Philosopher's Holiday Lecture by Meghan O'Gieblyn

During the last years of her life, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote in her private journals: “I must try to cure faults through the attention and not through the will.” While Weil is widely known for her writing on attention, less has been written about her conception of will, a word that appears throughout her late spiritual writing and is often framed as the enemy of attention. The opposition of these two faculties can seem, on its surface, baffling (doesn’t attention require willpower?). But Weil’s understanding of attention is quite different from the effortful “focus” that’s often idealized in contemporary discourse about waning attention spans and resonates with older understandings of attention that appear in various religious traditions. In addition to exploring Weil’s use of these two concepts, the lecture will look to passages from the Philokalia, the Upanishads, the Desert Fathers, and the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch, who similarly argued that when it comes to the most valuable things in life—creativity, spiritual growth, love, and self-transcendence—attention succeeds where brute effort fails.

O’Gieblyn is the author of the essay collection Interior States, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction, and God, Human, Animal, Machine. Her latest book, Will and Attention, is scheduled for publication by Doubleday in October 2026.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact the Office of Campus Activities at 845-437-5370.

The Philosopher’s Holiday Lecture is sponsored by the Philosophy Department, Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies Program, Religion Department, English Department, and the Dean of the Faculty.

Campus community only, please.