Please join us over Zoom to discuss the current Ph.D. work of Maria de las Mercedes Lopez Mateo .
To attend this event, please register below. The AWS will send out a zoom invitation to all members in the days leading up to the event including the chapter to read beforehand. The event itself will be a friendly discussion of Mercedes’ work and we invite you to bring your thoughts, ideas, and constructive critiques of the chapter.
Rootedness Beyond Progress: Simone Weil’s Conception of the Future
In The Need for Roots, Simone Weil clearly specifies that a human being has roots by virtue of their participation in a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. While there is an abundant body of literature—both primary and secondary—on Weil’s understanding of the past (for instance, her relationship to culture, tradition, or Greece), this is not the case with regard to the future, which she seems to address primarily in terms of a critique of progress.
How, then, are we to understand what it means to be rooted in the future, when much of the philosophy of the last centuries has been able to pose this question only in terms of progress? This chapter proposes an interpretation of the Weilian definition of the future and argues that it conceals ethical and political perspectives that ultimately lead back to Aristotelian philosophy.
Mercedes López is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, supported by a fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Universities. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona), the Autonomous University of Madrid, and Carlos III University of Madrid. She also holds a master’s degree in Philosophical Criticism and Argumentation, as well as a master’s degree in Classical Studies. Her PhD dissertation focuses on the concept of rootedness in Simone Weil and her reception of classical literature and ancient political philosophy. The text presented here is part of her PhD dissertation, which she is currently writing.
Her most recent publications include a book on the Ethics of Care, Arqueología de los cuidados (Alianza Editorial, 2025); a monograph on Simone Weil (Libros de Filosofía & Co., 2023); and a new introduction to Plato’s Parmenides (Gredos, 2025), as well as peer-reviewed articles in several specialized journals in the fields of Philosophy and Classical Studies.