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 student of mathematics at the University of Vienna before having to move out because of the Nazi threat, considering that his Pan-European family (they subscribed to the ideology of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi) was known to be "enemies of any form of nationalism" and his grandfather was Jewish (a convert to Roman Catholicism).

[1] The younger Glasersfeld thus spent large parts of his life in Ireland (1940s), in Italy (1950s) where he worked with Silvio Ceccato, and in the United States.

[2] He studied and elaborated upon the work of Giambattista Vico, Jean Piaget's genetic epistemology, Bishop Berkeley's theory of perception, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and other important texts.

On the occasion of Ernst von Glasersfeld's 100th birthday in 2017, the international conference "Radical Constructivism – Past, Present and Future" took place at the University of Innsbruck.