Constructive Evolution
Constructive Evolution

Author: Michael Chapman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1988-06-24

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780521367127

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This book represents an attempt to understand the evolution of Jean Piaget's basic ideas in the context of his own intellectual development. Piaget sought to elucidate human knowledge by studying its origins and development. In this book, Michael Chapman applies the same method to Piaget's own thinking. Dr Chapman shows that some of the Swiss psychologist's essential ideas originated in adolescent philosophical speculations about the relation between science and value. These same ideas were then developed step by step in Piaget's investigations of children's cognitive development. Dr Chapman claims that Piaget's use of developmental psychology as a means for addressing questions about the evolution of knowledge has been misunderstood by psychologists approaching his work exclusively from the perspectives of their own discipline. Reconstructing Piaget's intellectual biography makes possible a better understanding of the questions he originally posed and the answers he subsequently provided. Dr Chapman concludes with an assessment of Piaget's relevance for contemporary psychology and philosophy and suggests ways in which Piagetian theory might be further developed.

Piaget's Conception of Evolution
Piaget's Conception of Evolution

Author: John Gerard Messerly

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9780847682430

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The first full-length study of Jean Piaget as a philosopher and evolutionist. Messerly traces Piaget's earliest conjectures about knowledge through its further developments to its mature formulation as 'genetic epistemology.' Messerly analyzes Piaget's constructivist theory of the evolution of human knowledge as continuous with, yet partially transcending, the biological process of adaptation to the environment. Messerly's study serves as an invitation to further explorations with Paiget's theory and will interest philosophers, biologists, and psychologists.

Piaget, Evolution, and Development
Piaget, Evolution, and Development

Author: Jonas Langer

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1998-06-01

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 1135690987

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Based on the 25th Anniversary Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society, this book represents cutting-edge work on the mechanisms of cognitive, social, and cultural development. The authors-anthropologists, biologists, historians of science, paleontologists, and psychologists-believe that a rebirth is in progress relating to the study of these mental developments. This volume seeks to illuminate this rebirth. The varied findings and approaches reported reveal that contemporary comparative research on mental development is in a phase of differentiation and integration. Far from being global and fused, this comparative study is a flowering field of diverse disciplinary approaches, empirical phenomena, scholarly topics, and theoretical perspectives. It focuses on the comparative phylogeny, ontogeny, and history of mentation-most notably on the comparative onset and offset ages, velocity, extent, sequencing, organization of thought, symbol, and value development. The world's leading authorities on the subject discuss the implications of the study of evolution for our models of the ontogenetic origins, development, and history of mentation, as well as determine the constraints that evolution imposes on mental development. Bringing the current interest in primate cognition to bear on studies of cognitive development in humans, this book will be of interest cognitive developmentalists, primatologists and comparitive psychologists.

Development and Evolution
Development and Evolution

Author: Stanley N. Salthe

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780262193351

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Development and Evolution surveys and illuminates the key themes of rapidly changing fields and areas of controversy that the redefining the theory and philosophy of biology. It continues Stanley Salthe's investigation of evolutionary theory, begun in his influential book Evolving Hierarchical Systems, while negating the implicit philosophical mechanisms of much of that work. Here Salthe attempts to reinitiate a theory of biology from the perspective of development rather than from that of evolution, recognizing the applicability of general systems thinking to biological and social phenomena and pointing towards a non-Darwinian and even a postmodern biology.