Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name: Seven Days with Second-Order Cybernetics
ISBN: 9780823255634
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Fordham University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Cybernetics; Knowledge Theory of; Science -- Philosophy;

Heinz von Foerster was the inventor of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes the investigator as part of the system he is investigating. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name provides an accessible, nonmathematical, and comprehensive overview of von Foerster's cybernetic ideas and of the philosophy latent within them. It distills concepts scattered across the lifework of this scientific polymath and influential interdisciplinarian. At the same time, as a book-length interview, it does justice to von Foerster's élan as a speaker and improviser, his skill as a raconteur.

Developed from a week-long conversation between the editors and von Foerster near the end of his life, this work playfully engages von Foerster in developing the difference his notion of second-order cybernetics makes for topics ranging from emergence, life, order, and thermodynamics to observation, recursion, cognition, perception, memory, and communication.

The book gives an English-speaking audience a new ease of access to the rich thought and generous spirit of this remarkable and protean thinker.

Heinz von Foerster is one of the most consequential thinkers in the history of cybernetics. Von Foerster wrote nearly two hundred professional papers, gaining renown in fields from computer science and artificial intelligence to epistemology and family therapy.Müller Albert :

Albert Müller is Professor of History in the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte at the University of Vienna and the general secretary of the Heinz von Foerster Society.Müller Karl H. :

Karl H. Müller is Head of the Vienna Institute for Social Scientific Documentation and Methodology (WISDOM) and the president of the Heinz von Foerster Society.Rooks Elinor :

Elinor Rooks is a doctoral student at the University of Leeds.Kasenbacher Michael :

Michael Kasenbacher is a social scientist and translator.