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The Significance of Piaget's Researches on the Psychogenesis of Atomism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2022
Extract
What is remarkable about the history of atomism is the fact that it can be traced back to the very beginning of human reflection on nature. It is needless to recall the Pythagorean monadism and the names of Leucippus, Democritus and Lucretius: atomism is clearly as old as the first scientific and even proto-scientific explanations of nature. What is even more remarkable is that human thought was able so early and without the aid of microscope and measuring devices to anticipate one of the main findings of modern science. The significance of this anticipation is not diminished by the fact that only the most general features of modern atomism were present in the thought of its ancient ancestors: it was still quite an achievement in the fifth century B.C. to hold the view that space is infinite, that matter is homogeneous and discontinuous in its structure and that all diversity and all changes in nature are reducible to the configurations and displacements of homogeneous, permanent units.
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- Contributed Papers
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- PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1970 , 1970 , pp. 446 - 455
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- Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1970
References
Notes
1 Cf. Kemp Smith, N. A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Humanities Press, New York, 1962, pp. 489-91Google Scholar. The correlation between extensionless points and mathematical continuity of space can be seen especially clearly in Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics, The Norton Library, 1964.
2 K. Lasswitz, Atomistik und Kriticismus, Braunschweig 1878, in particular Chapter VII, ‘Das Apriori in der Physik’.
3 Cf. Van Orman Quine, W., Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia University Press, New York, 1969, pp. 126-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campbell, Donald T., ‘Evolutionary Epistemology’, to appear in; The Philosophy of Karl R. Popper, The Library of Living Philosophers, The Open Court Publishing Company, La Salle, IllinoisGoogle Scholar; Capek, M., ‘The Development of Reichenbach’s Epistemology’, The Review of Metaphysics 11 (1957) 42–67Google Scholar; ‘La throne biologique de la connaissance chez Bergson et sa signification actuelle’, Revue de mitaphysique et de morale 44 (1959) 194–211Google Scholar.
4 Piaget, Jean, Psychology of Intelligence, Littlefield, Adams & Co., Patterson 1960, p. 7Google Scholar.
5 La construction du réel chez Venfant, Neuchatel 1937, pp. 11-96
6 Le développement des quantités physiques)chez l'enfant: conservation et atomisme, 2nd ed., Neuchatel 1962, esp. pp. 81-140.
7 Ibid., p. 279.
8 La genèse du nombre chez l'enfant, Neuchatel 1950; ‘Zahlen und Messen’, in Hermann von Helmholtz, Schriften zur Erkenntnistheorie (ed. and annotated by P. Hertz and M. Schlick), Berlin 1921, p. 82.
9 L'Introduction à la épistemologie génétique, Paris 1951, II, pp. 212-13.
10 The term used by Gonseth, Ferdinand in Les mathématiques et la réalité, Paris, 1936, p. 158Google Scholar.
11 The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1951, pp. 189-90Google Scholar.
12 Putnam, H., ‘Is Logic Empirical’? in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. V, D. Reidel and Humanities Press, Dordrecht and New York, 1969, pp. 216-41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Finkelstein, ‘Matter, Space and Logic’, the same volume, pp. 215. Cf. in the same volume my article ‘Ernst Mach’s Biological Theory of Knowledge’, pp. 400-20. Putnam's radical empiricism in his essay is hardly compatible with his insistence on the timelessness (‘tenselessness’) of reality, including that of the future, in his article ‘Time and Physical Geometry’ The Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967) 240-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where he upholds a position very close to the most extreme forms of traditional rationalism.