The Weave and the Wave

How Process-Relational Thinking Changed the World and Ourselves

Michael Foley

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9783112220061
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The aim of The Weave and the Wave is to explain the development, influence and benefits for the individual of the simple idea that everything is relation and process. This idea was common in early cultures, lost in the Christian era but gradually rediscovered and has now permeated disciplines right across the sciences and humanities, leading to radical new thinking about time, complexity, history, matter, individualism, the self, the brain, the body, the senses, emotion, perception, memory, learning, ageing, and the nature, attitude to, and experience of inanimate objects, all relevant to the individual and everyday life. For the process philosophers who first fully developed this way of thinking had no desire to theorize and create a new specialism, or to benefit existing specialisms, but only to make everyday experience richer, more vivid and more intense, while cautioning that this requires constant effort. If everything is connected and constantly changing, then it is necessary to pay attention constantly and learn constantly. Michael Foley, a poet and novelist, pays attention to all this and more in a witty, engaging, literary style that draws on the arts and personal experience as well as philosophy and science.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Dedication
• Quotation
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 How the Weave and the Wave Won the West
• 2 The Tyranny of the Wave
• 3 The Complexity of the Weave
• 4 The Chastening of the Mind
• 5 The Revelation of the Body
• 6 The Enigma of Stuff
• 7 The Seven Deadly Sins of Petrifaction
• 8 The Seven Redeeming Virtues of Surprise
• 9 The Harmony of Antinomy
• 10 The Learning of Ignorance
• 11 The Mystery of Age
• Person Index