 Simone Weil was born in Paris on 3 February 1909. Her parents, both of whom came from Jewish families, provided her with an assimilated, secular, bourgeois French childhood that was cultured and comfortable. Weil and her older brother André—himself a math prodigy, founder of the Bourbaki group, and a distinguished mathematician at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study—studied at prestigious Parisian schools. Weil’s first philosophy teacher, at the Lycée Victor-Duruy, was René Le Senne; it was he who introduced her to the thesis—which she would maintain—that contradiction is a theoretical obstacle generative of nuanced, alert thinking. Beginning in October 1925, Weil studied at Henri IV Lycée in preparation for the entrance exams of the École Normale Supérieure. At Henri IV she studied under the philosopher and essayist Émile-Auguste Chartier (known pseudonymously as Alain), whose teacher was Jules Lagneau. Like Weil at this time, Alain was agnostic. In his classes he emphasized intellectual history: in philosophy this included Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant, and in literature, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Already sympathetic with the downtrodden and critical of French society, she gained the theoretical tools to levy critiques against her country and philosophical tradition in Alain’s class. There, employing paradox and attention through the form of the essay (it is important to note that none of her writings was published as a book in her lifetime), she began intentionally developing what would become her distinct mode of philosophizing. It is therefore arguable that she is part of the Alain/Lagneau line of voluntarist, spiritueliste philosophy in France.