Piaget before Piaget

Fernando Vidal

The great Swiss psychologist and theorist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) had much to say about the developing mind. He also had plenty to say about his own development, much of it, as Fernando Vidal shows, plainly inaccurate. In the first truly historical biography of Piaget, Vidal tells the story of the psychologist's intellectual and personal development up to 1918. By exploring the philosophical, religious, political, and social influences on the psychologist's early life, Vidal alters our basic assumptions about the origins of Piaget's thinking and his later psychology. The resulting profile is strikingly dissimilar to Piaget's own retrospective version. . In Piaget's own account, as an adolescent he was a precocious scientist dedicated to questions of epistemology. Here we find him also - and increasingly - concerned with the foundations of religious faith and knowledge, immersed in...

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