Eric Rosseel

Address :

SOCI, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, B - 1050 Brussels, Belgium.

Telephone

+32-2/629 20 45

E-Mail:

ecrossee@vub.ac.be

Eric Rosseel ( born 1950) dreamt to become a writer but he ended up as a work psychologist who (due to his working-class background) decided to look for a 'career' outside personnel and human resources management. Step by step he entered the University of Brussels and received his Ph.D. with a dissertation on 'Orientations to Work'. In his conceptual framework and more particularly the conclusions of his dissertation he manifests already clearly his search for a psychology that views the human person in his or her concrete social societal and historical context while at the same time understanding the person from within. In the years after his Ph.D. he sought his way in a field that crosses social psychology, work psychology, political psychology and meta-psychology. He has produced solidly based quantitative work (e.g. about 'Work Flexibilisation in Belgium'; 'Rising Extreme-Right Political Attitudes'; 'Evolutions of the Work Ethic Among the Youth'; Work and Alcohol') as well as 'provocative' unpublished texts that lead a more clandestine life among his more artistic and bohemian friends and students of the University.

With Francis Heylighen & Frank De Meyere he introduced the new strands of science philosophies (second-order cybernetics; chaos theory; radical constructivism) at the University of Brussels by a famous symposium 'Self-Steering and Cognition in Complex Systems' (1987). In that year also, he was proximus to the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana when he received his doctor honoris causa at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

The last years Eric Rosseel has been particularly active at the Centre for Sociology along two basic lines: a) setting up a network of competent African researchers to study the human and social problems of urbanization and modernization in Central and East-Africa and to compare African evolutions with European evolutions; b) trying to develop a (wo)man-view and a worldview that surpasses the dilemma between French Rationality and German Romanticism or between Modernity and Postmodernity. He is currently preparing a book in English on 'Ethical Socialism: A Bridge spanning the 20th Century.'

His writing style very often brings him back to his old dream of become a writer. And indeed, he published some poems in famous Flemish literary reviews.