IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 66

accepted an appointment as instructor of mathematics
at M.I.T., where he worked until his death in 1964 [26].
Their view allows little attention to other strands of
Wiener's life and the people who influenced him from
1907 to 1915, a period of foundational influence around
his college and university schooling. Instead, these
researchers focus on Wiener primarily through the lens
of interwar science and mathematics and as an overpressured child prodigy who then became a peculiar,
if not manic, numbers man at M.I.T. Such framing may
overly mirror Wiener's own carefully curated presentation of himself as a Cold War hero of mathematics, as
put forth in his two autobiographies, Ex-prodigy: My
Childhood and Youth [28] and I am a Mathematician:
The Later Life of a Prodigy [30].
Additionally, researchers position Wiener in lockstep with his later-in-life contemporaries, most notably
Claude Shannon and John von Neumann. The two
men are certainly relevant to Wiener and cybernetics,
but a continued focus on them as prime influencers
limits any consideration of Wiener and his own brand
of cybernetics. On the occasions when scholars have

Throughout his college career, Wiener
enjoyed a largely interdisciplinary
approach to learning.

noted Wiener's unique humanistic take on cybernetics
- markedly distinct from that of Shannon and von
Neumann - they have typically positioned it as a reaction to the child prodigy's strained relationship with his
father, rather than to his formative study of philosophy
with the greats of American pragmatism.
In the end, researchers have overlooked Wiener as
a philosopher during a crucial point in his life intellectually and personally - a time that would have a lasting
effect on his outlook and, arguably, his interdisciplinary
approach to systematic problem-solving. In Wiener's later
years, his friends and colleagues noted that he had "drifted away from mathematics into other disciplines" and
suggested that he had a third autobiography still to write
and best titled After-Math [12, p.373]. Wiener, in fact, had
returned to his roots much earlier, having titled a chapter
in Ex-Prodigy, his earliest autobiography, "A Philosopher
Despite Himself." This phrase came to represent both Wiener's roots and his worldview, and it remained a suitable
moniker throughout his life [29, p.164].

Wiener did not solely study mathematics in college and university. Throughout his college career, he
enjoyed a largely interdisciplinary approach to learning, attending lectures and classes on a variety of subjects. In 1909, he graduated from Tufts College with
a bachelor's degree in both biology and mathematics.
Wiener went on to study zoology at Harvard Graduate
School, until he transferred to the university's Philosophy Department, where he received a master's (1912)
and a Ph.D. (1913) degree [26].
As a student at Harvard, Wiener had the rare opportunity to be exposed to several iconic philosophers,
most notably James, a longtime associate of Wiener's
father, a professor of Slavic languages at Harvard.
James first wrote of Norbert Wiener as a 7-year-old
prodigy in 1901 and welcomed him into his home six
years later to discuss philosophy, just as Wiener set
out on his college career [28, p. 222]. From the "father
of pragmatism," Wiener went at 18 to study philosophy
with Russell at Cambridge University in England for
two years [26], [28, p. 268]. Russell, in turn, suggested
that Wiener take up a yearlong postdoctoral position
with Dewey at Columbia University, where the older
philosopher and mathematician was gaining attention
for putting pragmatism to "socially purposeful uses"
[4]. Dewey was also in the process of proposing a
theory of inquiry based on broad, "instrumental uses
of technology" [14].
The influence of these philosophers and their views
on pragmatism were not isolated to Wiener's life in the
early 1900s. Years later, Russell - a celebrity scholar
in his own right - wrote flatteringly of Wiener's book
Cybernetics (1948) in What Is Science, a collection of
his own essays (1955). Additionally, Dewey and Wiener
joined in the Macy conferences - long considered
the incubator for the earliest cyberneticians - as participants [5], [28]. Each Macy conference tackled a
particular societal issue, and Dewey participated in
the first and longest Macy conference, on aging, from
1936 to 1952. He came to the ingathering as one of two
founding board members through his former student
Lawrence Frank, Macy conference organizer and regular
host to Wiener, his neighbor in Massachusetts [5], [1],
[11, pp. 348, 207].
As Heims explained, the Macy participants' interests
intertwined and were often "'nonscientific" disciplines,
the humanities, and flowed into the cybernetic ethos:
"Each variant typically entailed an individual's synthesis
of several strands of thought, but usually it contained
some echo of John Dewey's pragmatism and focus on
education" [13, p. 170]. Similarly, other scholars have
cast the Macy conferences as "cultivated multidisciplinary scientiﬁc approaches to problems involving
signiﬁcant public consequences - a Deweyan ideal

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