We are honoured to welcome Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of Philosophy & Ethics Rebecca Rozelle-Stone from the University of North Dakota, to deliver the 2026 Simone Weil Lecture on Human Value.

Rebecca is a distinguished philosopher and internationally respected scholar of twentieth‑century European philosophy, with expertise in the thought of Simone Weil.

Rebecca is widely recognised for her contributions to Simone Weil studies, including her most recent book Simone Weil: A Very Short Introduction published in 2024.

Through her teaching, writing, and public lectures, Rebecca brings philosophy into direct conversation with lived experience, resisting abstraction in favour of depth, clarity, and moral seriousness. Her work challenges audiences to reconsider philosophy not as intellectual indulgence, but as a disciplined practice capable of interrupting violence, cultivating attention, and opening new possibilities for human flourishing.

Rebecca’s commitment to truth‑seeking, ethical responsibility, and radical forms of relationality resonates profoundly with the spirit of the Simone Weil Lecture, offering a powerful and timely invitation to reflect on how philosophy might still shape the moral imagination of our time.

About the lecture

Is philosophy today a frivolity? In a time when truth-seeking is regularly mocked, amorality is treated as fashionable, distractions from contemplation are ubiquitous, and sadism is both rationalized and glamorized in our political worlds, is philosophy simply an intellectual indulgence that no longer holds relevance for us? Or could it be that philosophy still uniquely offers us a way life that goes beyond analytic puzzles, mere critiques of fallacy, correctives to falsehood, and resistance to violence—as valuable as these tasks undoubtedly are? Could we reclaim philosophy as an affirmative and active “loving of wisdom,” a kind of askesis (exercise) that not only institutes a pause in the domain of force but also that ushers in what is genuinely good, including new and radical models of relationality with others?