 Before discussing Murdoch’s notion of attention, some remarks about Weil are in order, because of her profound impact on Murdoch, not only in relation to attention. Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher (though never a university professor), political activist, and, in her later (short) life a kind of Christian mystic. Murdoch encountered Weil’s writings in the early 1950s, and reviewed her Notebooks in 1956 (“Knowing the Void”). Murdoch mentions her only briefly in her earlier writings; Weil, unlike Sartre, was not a figure at all familiar to British philosophy of those years, and indeed she is still little known to Anglo-American philosophers (see the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on  Simone Weil).  But as in the quote above, Murdoch always makes her debt to Weil evident. Weil influenced Murdoch’s turn to Platonism, and her particular interpretation of Plato. She certainly bolstered the continuing Christian elements in Murdoch’s thought, as well as Murdoch’s increasing invoking of mysticism as related to morality, especially in Metaphysics. She probably influenced Murdoch’s view of psychic energy (understood on a Freudian model) as “mechanical”, something to which we are subjected. And Murdoch made use of Weil’s notion of “void” as part her moral outlook in Metaphysics.