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Michel Weber


Michel Weber is a Belgian philosopher, born in Brussels in 1963. 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.

Weber was educated in Belgium and the United States. The primary languages of his publications are English and French.

As a principal source of inspiration, Weber promotes the ideas of a group of loosely associated thinkers from the early 20th century who applied evolutionary thinking to psychology, epistemology, cosmology, metaphysics, and theology, giving rise to the school of thought now known as “process philosophy.” Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), along with C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and William James (1842–1910), is regarded as one of the fathers of process philosophy. This mostly Anglo-American school of thought still finds only minority endorsement in academic philosophy departments. Nevertheless, despite its limited reception in the United States and Great Britain, process philosophy has begun to interest a small but growing number of scholars worldwide. By organizing a global network of like-minded scholars and fostering the publication of their ideas in Europe, Weber has contributed significantly to the visibility of process philosophy in Europe.

There also appears to be a shift of focus. Until recently, interest in Whitehead, especially in the United States, tended to focus on process theology. Whitehead's brief but provocative theological speculations, added almost as an afterthought at the end of his major philosophical opus Process and Reality (1929), were elaborated into an excitingly new natural theology that seemed particularly attractive to Christian theologians because it made naturalistic sense of God's personal love for creatures. This theological emphasis, however, along with a sometimes evangelical tone adopted by Whitehead's more ardent devotees, may be the reason for the marginalization of process philosophy in mainstream academic philosophy.


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