The Philosophical Significance of Piaget’s Researches on the Genesis of the Concept of Time

Abstract

In the introduction to his book The Child’s Conception of Time (hereafter, CCT, Piaget (1969, p. VII) wrote that his researches on the development of the concept of time were inspired by Albert Einstein who fifteen years before the publication of that book (i.e. in 1931) presided over the international course of lectures on psychology and philosophy at Davos in Switzerland. Einstein suggested to Piaget a number of questions such as the following ones: “Is our intuitive grasp of time primitive or derived? Is it identical with our intuitive grasp of velocity? What, if any, bearing do these questions have on the genesis and development of the child’s conception of time?” Piaget then continued:

Every year since then we have made a point of looking into these questions, at first with little hopes of success because, as we quickly discovered, the time relationships constructed by young children are so largely based on what they hear from adults and not on their own experiences. But when, after trying to apply the idea of ‘groupings’ to the development of the child’s conception of number and quantity, we went on to apply it to the concept of motion, velocity and time, we discovered that the problems of duration and temporal succession had become greatly simplified. The results are presented in this volume.