Piaget, Jean 1896-1980 Jean Piaget was born in 1896 in
Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and died in Geneva in 1980. He graduated
from the University of Neuchâtel in 1918 as a Doctor of Natural
Sciences with a dissertation on mollusks, but he had always been
deeply interested in philosophy. Subsequently, he studied
psychology, logic, and philosophy of sciences in Zurich and at
the Sorbonne in Paris. He held various professorships in
sociology, philosophy of sciences, history of scientific
thought, experimental psychology, and developmental psychology
at the Universities of Neuchâtel, Geneva, and Lausanne, and the
Sorbonne, but his research interest starting in the 1920s was in
epistemology. He is often viewed as a psychologist, but child
psychology for him was a means for answering epistemological
questions such as: How do we know what we think we know, and how
did humanity build knowledge since its prehistoric beginnings?
As a scientist, he insisted that such questions had to be
answered scientifically, but historical