Ernst von Glasersfeld

Psychologist, Author

1917 – 2010

60

Who was Ernst von Glasersfeld?

Ernst von Glasersfeld 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 coined the term radical constructivism and spent large parts of his life in Ireland, in Italy 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.As von Glasersfeld says “knowledge is the result of an individual subject’s constructive activity, not a commodity that somehow resides outside the knower and can be conveyed or instilled by diligent perception or linguistic communication.” The radical constructivist movement abandons the traditional philosophical position of realism according to which knowledge has to be a representation of an essential reality. Constructivism adopts the relativist position that knowledge is something which is personally constructed by individuals in an active way, as they try to give meaning to socially accepted and shared notions.

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Born
Mar 8, 1917
Munich
Nationality
  • Austria
  • United States of America
Profession
Employment
  • University of Georgia
Lived in
  • Munich
Died
Nov 12, 2010

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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