Origins, Trends and Perspectives of Historical-Epistemological Research on Piaget

Abstract

In this paper, several points of view are adopted to present the research directions of contemporary Piagetian historiography. This article first notes the immensity of the secondary literature (20’000 texts) related to Piaget’s work, between empirical and historical-epistemological works. In order to get a more precise idea, we carried out various analyses of the scope of influence of his work: on the 2000 keywords of the thesaurus of secondary literature from 1945 to 2012; on the reception of Piaget’s idea in France between 1920 and 1940; and on the disciplines of insertion of a thousand works from his private library, which were dedicated to him. These analyses corroborate Piaget’s multidisciplinary impact in the 20th century science and culture and indicate the existence of an international Piagetian movement, which has not yet been studied. The factors of production and the recent orientations of the secondary literature are then discussed, showing the changes in the historiography of the last 50 years. Finally, future research directions are outlined between the exploitation of unknown archives and the use of a digital edition of Piaget’s work, which is currently underway.

The Influence of Magnetic Fields, Including the Planetary Magnetic Field, on Complex Life Forms: How Do Biological Systems Function in This Field and in Electromagnetic Fields?

“…If, indeed, stepwise advances in cognition, memory ability, and related brain activities did occur during the evolutionary progression to Homo sapiens, then each step required effective integration into the existing paradigm. Interestingly, one is not apparently born with a fully developed set of cognition abilities, and they may continue to develop during post-natal development and maturation, as hypothesized by Piaget (reviewed in [66]). As the fully functional brain of an adult Homo sapiens expresses a pattern of electromagnetic signals as detected by MEG (reviewed in [67]); (discussed in [68]), there appears to be an intimate relationship between functional brain systems, brain biology (i.e., cell, biochemical and molecular) and magnetic fields.…”