Michel Weber
Michel Weber (born 1963) is a Belgian philosopher. He is best known as an interpreter and advocate of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and has come to prominence as the architect and organizer of an overlapping array of international scholarly societies and publication projects devoted to Whitehead and the global relevance of process philosophy.
For the canoeist, see Michel Weber (canoeist).
Michel Weber
Weber criticizes contemporary academic philosophy for losing touch with its early Greek roots. Philosophy has a practical mission (rooted in Socratic discourse) to restore personal and social well-being, but it cannot do this, he argues, if it renounces its traditional metaphysical obligation (rooted in pre-Socratic speculation) to understand the cosmos. Weber believes that process philosophy is uniquely qualified to fulfill this double function in the post-modern world.
Weber was educated in Belgium and the United States. The primary languages of his publications are English and French.
Education[edit]
Michel Weber studied applied economics at the Saint-Louis University, Brussels (candidat ingénieur commercial, 1986) and philosophy at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Louvain-la-Neuve (licencié en philosophie, 1991; docteur en philosophie, 1997). His master's thesis, written under the supervision of Jean Ladrière, dealt with the epistemological status of the "anthropic principle" in cosmology in light of the concepts of teleology (or "finality") found in Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Kant.
From 1993 to 1995, he was Visiting Scholar at the Center for Process Studies of the Claremont School of Theology and at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California (U.S.), where he worked under the supervision of John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin.
In 1997, he defended his doctoral thesis, Intuition pré-systématique et intuition ontologique chez Alfred North Whitehead. Euristique du pancréativisme de l’époque de Harvard (Pre-systematic Intuition and Ontological Intuition According to Alfred North Whitehead: The Heuristics of Pan-creativism in the Harvard Era), written under the supervision of Marcel Crabbé.[1]
Career[edit]
From 1997 to 2002 he was Research Fellow at the Centre de Logique de l’Institut supérieur de Philosophie of the UCLouvain. From 2001 to 2002 he taught philosophy at the École européenne Bruxellensis II (European Baccalaureate, Anglophone Section, 6th and 7th years). From 2002 to 2007, he was Research Fellow at the Centre for Philosophical Anthropology of the UCLouvain Higher Institute of Philosophy.
In 2000, Weber created, with the support of François Beets and Paul Gochet (University of Liège), the Chromatiques whiteheadiennes and the Whitehead Psychology Nexus,[2] two scholarly societies intended to federate research on different aspects, nuances, and implications of the thought of A. N. Whitehead. In 2001, he created the European William James Project with Jack Barbalet (University of Leicester), Jaime Nubiola (University of Navarra) and the late Timothy L. S. Sprigge (Emeritus Edinburgh).
In 2002, he created the research seminars "Chromatiques whiteheadiennes" with the cooperation of the "Philosophies of Experience" research center at the Université de Nantes Department of Philosophy and the Center for the Study of Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy at the Sorbonne (le Centre d'Études sur le Pragmatisme et la Philosophie Analytique or CEPPA, but renamed since as EXeCO; Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne-École Doctorale).[3]
Since 2004, he has been the Editorial Director of the series Chromatiques whiteheadiennes for the academic publisher Ontos Verlag (Frankfurt) and Editorial Co-director, along with Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh) and Johanna Seibt (Aarhus & Konstanz), of the Process Thought series, also with Ontos Verlag (Advisory Board: Mark Bickhard, Lehigh; Jaime Nubiola, Navarra; and Roberto Poli, Trento).[4]
Since 2005, he has co-edited the Chromatikon: Annuaire de la philosophie en procès — Yearbook of Philosophy in Process at the Presses universitaires de Louvain, first with Diane d'Eprémesnil (UCLouvain), then with Pierfrancesco Basile (University of Bern), and now with Ronny Desmet (Vrije Universiteit Brussel).
In 2006, he created the Chromatiques whiteheadiennes "Centre for Philosophical Practice," a non-profit organization.[5] The center now federates the three networks mentioned above (the Chromatiques whiteheadiennes, the Whitehead Psychology Nexus, and the European William James Project) and provides an institutional base for two new activities: first, the publication of a scholarly book series appearing under the label Les Éditions Chromatika (Chromatika Editions) and, second, the opening in Brussels of Belgium's first philosophical counseling service or "philosophical praxis."[6]
Since 2007, he has been a member of the "Contemporary Ontological Visions" network of the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. In 2008–9, he was Visiting Professor at the New Bulgarian University, Department of Cognitive Science and Psychology & Department of Philosophy and Sociology.
Since 2009, Weber is also a trained hypnotherapist (Institut Milton Erickson, Brussels).