Michel Weber

• 1. Introduction

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  Michel Weber, born in 1963, arrived at philosophy by way of applied economics. He began at Saint-Louis University in Brussels, earning a degree in commercial engineering in 1986, before crossing the city's intellectual landscape to the University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, where he would spend more than a decade becoming one of Europe's most energetic champions of a school of thought that most philosophy departments still treat with suspicion. That school is process philosophy, and Weber has made it his life's work to drag it from the margins into view. How did a Belgian economist-turned-philosopher become the central organizer of a global network devoted to a thinker who died in 1947? What is process philosophy, and why does Weber believe it is the only framework capable of answering philosophy's oldest obligations? And what does it mean, in practice, to build a philosophical culture from scratch across national borders and academic traditions?

• 2. The Making of a Process Thinker

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  Weber's master's thesis, written at Louvain under the direction of Jean Ladrière, probed one of cosmology's most contested puzzles: the epistemological status of the anthropic principle. He examined it through the lenses of teleology in Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Kant. The choice was revealing. Weber was not content with philosophy as a technical exercise; he wanted it to address the largest questions about the universe and humanity's place in it. Between 1993 and 1995, he traveled to Claremont, California, as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Process Studies of the Claremont School of Theology and at Claremont Graduate University. There he worked under John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin, two of the most prominent figures in Whiteheadian scholarship at the time. Those years in California planted the seeds of his doctoral research back in Belgium. In 1997, Weber defended his thesis under Marcel Crabbé at Louvain. Its title, in full: Intuition pré-systématique et intuition ontologique chez Alfred North Whitehead: Euristique du pancréativisme de l'époque de Harvard. The thesis introduced a term Weber would press throughout his career: pancreativism, his preferred description of Whitehead's metaphysics, which he regards as distinct from both pantheism and panentheism.

• 3. Building the Network

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  The year 2000 marks the moment Weber began to build something larger than individual scholarship. With the support of François Beets and Paul Gochet of the University of Liège, he founded two scholarly societies that year: the Chromatiques whiteheadiennes and the Whitehead Psychology Nexus. The aim was to bring together researchers working on different facets of Whitehead's thought from across disciplines and national traditions. A year later, he extended the network into American pragmatism by creating the European William James Project alongside Jack Barbalet of the University of Leicester, Jaime Nubiola of the University of Navarra, and the late Timothy L. S. Sprigge of Edinburgh. By 2006, these three networks were brought under a single institutional roof: the Chromatiques whiteheadiennes Centre for Philosophical Practice, a non-profit organization registered in Brussels. The Centre provided the infrastructure for a publishing house, Éditions Chromatika, and for Belgium's first formal philosophical counseling service. Weber's collaborators by this point numbered around 150 scholars from every continent, and together they had produced some 30 co-edited volumes gathering hundreds of original papers on process philosophy in interdisciplinary and multicultural contexts.

• 4. Process Philosophy and Its Rivals

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  Alfred North Whitehead, who lived from 1861 to 1947, is considered one of the founding figures of process philosophy, alongside C. S. Peirce (1839-1914), Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and William James (1842-1910). The tradition applies evolutionary thinking to psychology, epistemology, cosmology, metaphysics, and theology, yet it has never achieved more than minority status in mainstream philosophy departments in the United States or Great Britain. Part of the reason, Weber argues, lies in how Whitehead's ideas were received. The theological speculations Whitehead included almost as an afterthought at the end of his 1929 opus Process and Reality were taken up and amplified by Christian theologians who found in them a naturalistic account of God's personal love for creatures. The resulting emphasis on process theology, sometimes delivered with what the source describes as an evangelical tone, may have contributed to the marginalization of process philosophy in secular academic settings. Nicholas Rescher, the eminent American philosopher, attempted a correction with his 1996 book Process Metaphysics, defending process thinking as the optimal matrix for systematic theorizing about the nature of things. Weber followed Rescher's lead, cultivating a critical and largely secular appreciation for process philosophy, and in 2006 he translated Process Metaphysics into French.

• 5. Publishing and Presence

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  Since 2004, Weber has served as Editorial Director of the Chromatiques whiteheadiennes series at the academic publisher Ontos Verlag in Frankfurt. He shares editorial co-direction of Ontos Verlag's Process Thought series with Nicholas Rescher of Pittsburgh and Johanna Seibt, associated with Aarhus and Konstanz. The advisory board for that series includes Mark Bickhard of Lehigh, Jaime Nubiola of Navarra, and Roberto Poli of Trento. Since 2005, Weber has also co-edited Chromatikon: Annuaire de la philosophie en procès, a philosophical yearbook published at the Presses universitaires de Louvain; its current co-editor is Ronny Desmet of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The most ambitious publication Weber has overseen is the two-volume Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, co-edited with Will Desmond. The Handbook gathers 115 entries written by 101 internationally recognized experts. Its stated goal is to interpret Whitehead secundum Whitehead, survey the current state of Whiteheadian scholarship, and map directions for future inquiry. Another volume, co-edited with Anderson Weekes, opens a dialogue between process philosophy and contemporary consciousness studies, drawing on psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Weber's own authored output runs to 10 monographs and 80 scholarly articles and encyclopedia entries.

• 6. Philosophical Practice and the Wider Mission

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  Weber's diagnosis of contemporary philosophy is sharp: it has lost touch with its early Greek roots. Philosophy carries, he argues, a practical mission rooted in Socratic dialogue to restore personal and social well-being. At the same time it must not abandon the metaphysical obligation, rooted in pre-Socratic cosmological speculation, to understand the structure of the universe. Process philosophy, in his view, is the only current framework capable of honoring both demands at once. This conviction drove him to open Belgium's first philosophical counseling service, an application of Socratic methods to short-term counseling that does not seek to replace psychotherapy but to offer a complement to it. In July 2010, Weber organized an Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute in Paris, held at the Cité universitaire's Fondation Biermans Lapôtre; a second Institute followed in July 2011. Since 2009, he has also trained as a hypnotherapist at the Institut Milton Erickson in Brussels, extending his practice into clinical territory. In May 2014, the philosophical counseling service relocated to the Centre Kinos, now named Tonaki, at UCLouvain in Louvain-la-Neuve. His 2000 monograph on intuition in Whitehead's philosophy was awarded the Prix du Concours annuel by the Classe des Lettres de l'Académie Royale de Belgique, a recognition that placed his secular, technically rigorous reading of Whitehead before one of Belgium's oldest scholarly institutions.