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	Heinz von Foerster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		He was born in Vienna and died in Pescadero, California.
		Von Foerster studied physics at the Technical University of Vienna and at the University of Breslau, influenced by the Vienna Circle and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
		He moved to the USA in 1949 and worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Heinz_von_Foerster (167 words)

	Encyclopedia: Heinz von Foerster (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Heinz von Foerster (originally Förster) was born in Vienna, the eldest son of Emil von Förster and his wife Lilith, and educated in philosophy and logic by the Vienna Circle, and in physics at Vienna's Technical University.
		Although von Foerster is known in some circles for his excursion into demographics (when he started lively debate in the journal Science), he was most important for sponsoring radical work in such subjects as the organisation of the living and the foundations of mathematics and logic.
		Heinz von Foerster, cybernetician, was born on November 13, 1911.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Heinz-von-Foerster (659 words)

	Heinz von Foerster
		For Heinz, the profound understanding of the magician's attitude merged with his passion for physics and became the source of a kind of wisdom that is usually alien to science.
		Heinz von Foerster, an internationally influential physicist, philosopher and cybernetician who did groundbreaking studies of population growth and scientific cognition, died of heart failure at his Pescadero home Wednesday.
		von Foerster was born in Vienna in 1911 to Emil and Lilith von Foerster, whose family included the painter Erwin Lang, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the playwright Hugo von Hoffmansthal.
	www.oikos.org /foerster.htm (2621 words)

	[No title]
		Heinz von Foerster shifts the observation of self and the world from the level of first order, that deals with the direct naming of objects and situations, to the level of second order, at which observers are observed as to how and under which conditions they observe the world.
		The principle of objectivity according to Heinz von Foerster (see 1993f, p 63; 1993g, p 88), demands the separation of the observer from the observed and requires that the personal qualities of the observer are kept apart from his descriptions.
		Heinz von Foerster argues that ethics cannot be articulated, for in the moment of their expression we tend to 'degenerate' into moralisations.
	www.hs-niederrhein.de /fb06/dozenten/bardmann/ebenen/down/download/social.doc (5457 words)

	Book Reviews: The Dream of Reality, Heinz Von Foerster's Constructivism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Heinz von Foerster Heinz von Foerster was born 1911 in Vienna.
		Heinz von Foerster is now Professor Emeritus of the Departments of Electrical Engineering and of Biophysics and Physiology of the University of Illinois and lives in California.
		Heinz von Foerster is one of the leading members of that incredibly gifted group of scientists who in 1949 got together under the auspices of the Josiah Macy Jr.
	home.pacbell.net /lsegal/book_dream.html (667 words)

	WHAT I LEARNED FROM HEINZ VON FOERSTER \| Paper, 2004
		Heinz and his co-authors replied that in the scientific community “support of a hypothesis is gained through compatibility with experimental observation rather than by arguments about what should be the case or what should not be the case.” The debate continued intermittently for two years.
		Heinz also introduced me to the correspondence principle – any new theory should reduce to the old theory, to which it corresponds, for those cases in which the old theory is known to hold.
		Heinz never referred to the correspondence principle in his articles, but I think that viewing his work as adding a dimension to the philosophy of science, namely “amount of attention paid to the observer,” helps to indicate the importance of his work.
	www.gwu.edu /~umpleby/recent_papers/2004_what_i_learned_from_heinz_von_foerster_by_umpleby.htm (4931 words)

	Heinz von Foerster, the scientist, the man
		Heinz was the right man at the right time in the role he played during those now mythical meetings known as the Macy cybernetics gatherings, as he amusingly relates in the interview.
		Besides, Heinz's style is one of posing questions and main principles in a concise form, which made his writings intellectual zettels I had in my pockets by the time I arrived as a graduate student at Harvard in 1968.
		Heinz kindly invited me to come to Illinois a few times during the time I was in Cambridge, and each time I was touched by the humor and openness of this Viennese.
	www.stanford.edu /group/SHR/4-2/text/varela.html (1179 words)

	GoogObits
		Heinz von Foerster, a physicist and a philosopher who was an early leader in
		von Foerster became the editor of the proceedings from the gatherings, which ultimately laid the groundwork for much of the future research on a diverse range of sciences, from biological physics to computer science.
		Dr. Von Foerster was a Guggenheim fellow (1956-57 and 1963-64).
	blogs.salon.com /0001604/categories/GoogObits/2002/11/11.html (996 words)

	Heinz Von Foerster (1911-2002)
		Heinz Von Foerster, one of the pioneers of the field of cybernetics, passed away this morning, October 2, 2002, at his home on Rattlesnake Hill in Pescadero, California.
		Heinz and his wife, Mai, have been close friends of DesignWorlds co-founders, Ted and Frona Kahn--and later, of their sons, Yoni and Aaron-- since Heinz became a member of the National Advisory Board of the Atari Institute for Educational Action Research which Ted founded and directed in 1981-83.
		Heinz was a member and recorder of the proceedings of the Cybernetics Group, an incredible interdisciplinary group of some of the most outstanding thinkers and scientists of the mid-20th century, brought together by the funding of the Josiah Macy Foundation from 1946-1953, and who helped give birth to post-World War II social science.
	www.designworlds.com /VonFoerster.html (375 words)

	SBeer
		Heinz and Stafford were great friends and each would have been deeply saddened by the passing of the other.
		Heinz had been struggling with congestive heart failure and took a turn for the worse in the past few weeks.
		Heinz and Mai have been a blessing and an inspiration to the cybernetics and systems communities and to so many of us as "human becomings" as Heinz liked to say.
	pages.britishlibrary.net /alexandrew/SBeer_HvF.htm (990 words)

	interview with Heinz von foerster
		This, then, is Heinz von Foerster's background as a human being: a very broad basis which is associated with dancing, with music, with philosophy, with mathematics, with physics, and with a particular touch of the thinking of the Vienna Circle people, including Wittgenstein and Carnap.
		hvf: As I told you I was a very bad student in history, a bad student in geography, a bad student in all of these things where you have to memorize data.
		Heinz von Foerster cannot help admiring the animal but adds that they have become a real pest, since they eat whatever plant they have been trying to grow.
	www.stanford.edu /group/SHR/4-2/text/interviewvonf.html (9075 words)

	Converge (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Heinz von Foerster is a rare breed - a mathematician, scientist, philosopher and a generalist, who more than anything else, is a thoughtful, reflective and playful man. A trans-disciplinary thinker, magician and master teacher, he makes every dialogue and interaction an unforgettable learning event.
		Cousin of the well-known philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, von Foerster was raised amid the lively conversations of the Vienna Circle of philosophers and thinkers.
		Von Foerster left Vienna for the United States over 50 years ago, and found himself in the center of one of the most interesting communities of thinkers of the mid-20th century.
	www.centerdigitaled.com /converge?pg=magstory&id=24798 (1375 words)

	.:\| randgaenge \|:. : Do, 3. Okt 2002 weblogs knowledge networks new media content - ISSN 1680-4961 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Heinz Von Foerster, one of the pioneers and co-founders of the field of cybernetics, died yesterday in his home on...
		Von Foerster's famous distinction between trivial and non-trivial machines is a starting point to recognize the complexity of cognitive behavior.
		Heinz von Foerster was born 1911 in Vienna, Austria, where he studied physics at the Vienna Technical University.
	randgaenge.net /2002/10/03.html (849 words)

	Carl Auer International :: Program
		These are the questions that physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster and journalist Bernhard Poerksen debate about in their conversations.
		Heinz von Foerster, 1911–2002, was known as the "Socrates of cybernetic thought".
		In 1957 Heinz von Foerster established the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois, where he had a professorship until his retirement in 1976.
	www.carl-auer.com /program.php?isbn=3-89670-234-3 (560 words)

	Radical Constructivism and Foreign Language Teaching
		At this institute, which was directed by Heinz von Foerster, a number of neurologists, philosophers and psychologists worked together on the problems of cybernetics and on the foundations of AI research (cp.
		Apart from Ernst von Glaserfeld, the Chilean neuro-biologist, Humberto Maturana, who was employed by the Biological Computer Laboratory for a certain period of time, belongs to the founding fathers of Radical Constructivism.
		This separation is seen as a fundamentally radical break, because the "language of the brain" is restricted to the various states of neuronal electric excitement of the neurons, to their chemical equivalents and to the transmitters in the synapses, which either pass on the electric stimuli of excitement or block them.
	webdoc.sub.gwdg.de /edoc/ia/eese/artic20/marcus/8_2000.html (6418 words)

	Ingenuity May 2004
		Von Foerster, wife Mai, and their growing family spent the war years in Berlin and in Silesia (now part of Poland), where von Foerster earned his physics PhD in 1944 at the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw).
		While von Foerster had developed expertise in vacuum tubes during his wartime research, the most exciting activity in physical electronics was moving away from tubes and into semiconductors, gaseous electronics, and electro-optics.
		McCullough invited von Foerster into an ongoing series of conferences on the East Coast, sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation, at which cybernetics and related subjects were being explored by the likes of John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and Margaret Mead.
	www.ece.uiuc.edu /ingenuity/504/vonfoerster.html (876 words)

	Epistemology of the observer
		For Heinz von Foerster, the goal of second-order cybernetics is to explain the observer to himself, that is, it is the cybernetics of the cybernetician.
		Von Foerster refers to this principle as Poincare's Thesis, in honour of the great French mathematician, who developed this argument in a paper about the processes of space and object perception (Poincaré, 1895).
		With respect to "what may be known", von Foerster likes to make a distinction between two classes of question, those that are decideable and those that are, in principle, undecideable.
	www.thehope.org /Bernard_Scott/Observer.html (1348 words)

	Heinz von Foerster: The Lived and Living Implicit
		Heinz and Mai took me under their prodigious wing and nurtured me on every conceivable level.
		[Heinz von Foerster (1911-2002) was a Viennese physicist who edited the famous Macy Conferences on Cybernetics and headed the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois.
		He was a Guggenheim Fellow, President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American Society for Cybernetics, President of the Society for General Systems Research, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
	www.crazytigerinstitute.com /heinz.htm (317 words)

	[No title]
		Abstract: The notion of eigen-value, contributed by von Foerster to the field of cybernetics, can be usefully applied to the understanding of the transformative process of narratives in therapy.
		Heinz, allow me to add that Spanish utterance to your family of magic words, as a small token for the many magic words that you added to mine.
		In that paper Heinz doesn’t attempt to define eigen-value, which seems to be a rather well known term (known, that is, to those who are familiarized with Recursive Function Theory, a collective that doesn’t include me among its members!).
	www.portalpsicologia.org /documento.jsp?idDocumento=2119 (1910 words)

	Heinz von Foerster -- population theorist, cybernetics trailblazer
		Heinz von Foerster -- population theorist, cybernetics trailblazer
		von Foerster was born in Vienna in 1911 to Emil and Lilith von Foerster,
		von Foerster was a mountaineer and a professional magician,
	www.sfgate.com /cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/10/08/BA158727.DTL&type=printable (651 words)

	Radical Constructivism Homepage
		Ethics and Second-order Cybernetics Talk of Heinz von Foerster at "Système, éthique et perspectives en thérapie familiale", Oct 4, 1990, Paris.
		Heinz von Foerster im Gespräch mit Albert Müller und Karl H. Müller Interview with Heinz von Foerster for the festschrift "Konstruktivismus und Kognitivismus".
		Georg Ivanovas' thinking is influenced by Heinz von Foerster and Gregory Bateson and focuses on medicine, perception, communication, and art being brought forth through self-generated perceptions.
	www.univie.ac.at /constructivism/people.html (2709 words)

	Heinz von Foerster Festschrift
		What impressed me about Heinz was the sense of freshness and enthusiasm that he brought to every encounter and his evident modesty, gentleness and courtesy.
		Heinz was one of the prestigious plenary speakers and gave a wonderful, inspiring talk on ethics and second order cybernetics (for Heinz on this theme, see von Foerster, 1993).
		Foerster, H. von, (1993) Ethics and second-order cybernetics, Psychiatria Danubia, 5, 1-2, pp.
	www.univie.ac.at /constructivism/HvF/festschrift/scott.html (926 words)

	Heinz von Foerster
		Heinz von Foerster, the scientist, the man (Francisco Varela)
		Since then and until today Heinz has been an untiring ear and friendly advisor.
		His ethical and human qualities are impeccable, and they have been a source of much needed inspiration.
	www.uni-koblenz.de /~odsgroe/wwwha/personen/foerster/foerster.html (261 words)

	Second Order Cybernetics as Cognitive Methodology
		The first part of the paper is deliberately first person and anecdotal, in the spirit of von Foerster's dictum, "life is studied in vivo not in vitro".
		You have succeeded in reversing evolution: now the sons are inventing the fathers." I have continued to appreciate von Foerster and his work and am proud and happy to consider myself as one of his sons.
		I run the risk that, for those familiar with von Foerster's work, what I say may seem trite and obvious and that, for those not so familiar, what I say may seem obscure.
	www.thehope.org /Bernard_Scott/Abs-Intro.html (756 words)

	Southern California Society for Ericksonian Psychotherapy and Hypnosis
		Von Foerster, Maturana and Cecchin and moderator Gary Ruelas present the similarities and differences of their perspectives in an informal discussion, ques-tions and answer session.
		Von Foerster, Maturana and Cecchin use their diverse perspectives to interview the intricacies of a family system.
		Von Foerster, Maturana and Cecchin and moderator Gary Ruelas present the similarities and differences of their perspectives in an informal discussion, questions and answer session.
	www.scseph.org /catalog/classics.php (1119 words)

	Heinz von Foerster Workshop
		Heinz von Foerster is a prominent thinker and an early cognitive scientist whose work has covered several areas of importance.
		His bibliography starts in 1943 and according to my knowledge he is still active, at the age of 87.
		Von Foerster is strongly against the idea of dividing the world into separate areas of study as is normally done in the scientific community.
	mlab.uiah.fi /~timo/vonfoerster (678 words)

	Heinz von Foerster: A Tribute (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Mai von Foerster says, "Heinz has a mind like a crystal!" His works have added immeasurably to the field; we can't say how much until we have a measure (as he would be the first to point out).
		His personal interactions with Lettvin, Pask, Beer, von Foerster, Maturana and Geoghegan, whether conversational or contractual, have been the fuel of his passion for the field of cybernetics.
		He is presently fulfilling the role of Chief Methodologist at Xerox's Object Technology Competency Center, whose charter is to harness the knowledge of the corporation in service of its goals, using "information technology" as the expressive medium.
	www.pangaro.com /abstracts/ASC-95-on-HvF.html (386 words)

	References of Cliff Joslyn, Letter: F
		Foerster, Heinz von, ed.: (1951) Transactions of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, v.
		Foerster, Heinz von, ed.: (1952) Transactions of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, v.
		Foerster, Heinz von, ed.: (1953) Transactions of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, v.
	www.c3.lanl.gov /~joslyn/refs/refs_f.html (1916 words)

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