545 - Conversations with Jean Piaget

Conversations with Jean Piaget
By Jean-Claude Bringuier
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980. 143 pp. $12.95.

These conversations bring to light vital connections between Piaget's work and his person. The author interprets in an insightful and often charming way basic concepts, working conditions, colleagues, and prospects for future research at the Center for Genetic Epistemology.

The broad, interdisciplinary scope of Piaget's research and writing is

546 - Conversations with Jean Piaget

characterized by a drive toward comprehensive unity. By contrast, his narrow view of certain subjects such as affectivity, religion, and metaphysics is also evident. Piaget emerges primarily as an epistemologist, not as a psychologist; as a creative thinker, not a systematician; as a structuralist re-interpreting Kant, not as a Platonist.

The book reveals much of Piaget's personality, so it assumes added significance since his death. Always consumed with his work, one of Piaget's final projects-in his mind since adolescence-was a demonstration of the isomorphic relationship between individual cognitive development and the evolution of science. His patience and impatience, his high sense of order in the midst of disorder, his humility and pride, all come through to deepen our understanding of the person behind the prodigious influence of his writing and research.

This book is not an introduction, but a highly readable enrichment of the already vast literature on Piaget.

James E. Loder
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.