ERNST VON GLASERSFELD

Ernst von Glasersfeld (March 8, 1917, Munich – November 12, 2010, Leverett, Franklin County, Massachusetts) was a philosopher, and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Georgia, Research Associate at the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was a member of the Board of Trustees, American Society of Cybernetics, from which he received the McCulloch Memorial Award in 1991. He was a member of the Scientific Board, Instituto Piaget, Lisbon. Von Glasersfeld invented the term radical constructivism and spent large parts of his life in Ireland (1940s), in Italy (1950s) where he worked with Silvio Ceccato, and in the US. Elaborating upon Giambattista Vico, Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology, Bishop Berkeley's theory of perception, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and other important texts, von Glasersfeld developed his model of Radical Constructivism, which is an ethos shared by all of these writers to one degree or another. He was also the creator of the first 120 symbols of the lexigram, a device used in the field of animal language.