Our colleague Michel Meyer, born on November 11, 1950 in Belgium, died suddenly on May 23, 2022, aged 71, at his home in Waterloo, near Brussels. He was professor emeritus at the Free University of Brussels. Meyer was a student, a collaborator and one of the heirs of Chaïm Perelman (1912–1884), who co-authored with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca The New rhetoric - A treatise on Argumentation. In 1986, Michel Meyer co-founded with Frans van Eemeren Rob Grootendorst and Christian Plantin our journal Argumentation.

Michel Meyer had an encyclopaedic mind; his passionate interests extended to all fields of knowledge. For almost forty years, he was the director of the Revue Internationale de Philosophie. The variety, relevance and topicality of the topics dealt with in the four annual issues of the journal testify to his vision and influence.

Meyer left behind a large body of work: more than thirty books. In 1977, he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy (Découverte et justification en science: Essai de déconstruction du néo-positivisme [Discovery and justification in science: a deconstruction of neo-positivism]).

In De la problématologie (Mardaga, 1986) [Of problematology, Chicago Press, 1996) he developed an original vision on argumentation and philosophy, with a new view of rationality founded on questioning.

Later Meyer applied his method to the most diverse issues in philosophy, rhetoric, and human sciences, literature, history and art. His Principia rhetorica (2008) addresses the general issue of “the negotiation of distance between individuals about a given issue”, as a general theory of argumentation — contrasting it with Perelman’s vision of rhetoric. The Principia moralia, which he published in 2013, investigates the status of morality in today’s world by relying on the concept of interindividual distance to present a synthetic view of ethical theories. In Meyer’s Principia politica — Histoire, économie, société, published in 2022, he questions the link between capitalism, religion, economy and society. His Esthétique Générale was published in 2009, and was to be followed by a new volume on aesthetics.

Michel Meyer was a scholar with a sharp mind. He was a passionate theorist and a keen observer of modernity. His distinctive laugh will still accompany us for a long time.