The Child as a Cartesian Thinker: Childrens' Reasonings About Metaphysical Aspects Of Reality

This text presents and analyzes children's judgements about fundamental metaphysical problems. In the first part of the book, dialogues with children are described which were constructed on the basis of Rene Descartes's "Meditations on First Philosophy" and dealt with children's ideas about such topics as the relationships between true and false knowledge, sensual images and physical objects, mind and body, personal existence of the external world, existence of the Supreme Being, and dreams and reality.; The second part of the book draws upon concepts which children of various ages have about psychological and metapsychological aspects of human reality, such as cognitive and moral development of the child, personal freedom and responsibility, the relationships between conscious and unconscious, and alive and non-alive, fundamental drives of a human individual for development and expansion of his or her needs and passions, for eternal life, and for the dreamlike world of accomplished wishes.; The book presents a systematic empirical and theoretical developmental study of the problems, some of which were touched upon in Piaget's early writings, but later abandoned by Piaget and only sporadically illuminated by other authors, and some of which are new to developmental psychological research.; This book whould be of interest to developmental psychologists, teachers, educationalists, social workers, lawyers and other professionals interested in the knowledge that four- to 14-year-old children have about the most fundamental aspects of reality and human beings.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 The child as a philosopher: studies of children's metaphysical thinking in developmental psychology; Descartes' "Meditation on First Philosophy" as a framework for the study of children's metaphysical judgements. Part 2 Children and Cartesian metaphysics - an experimental study of children's metaphysical reasonings: discussing the possibility of putting under doubt the adequacy of the perceptual images of objects and the existence of the external world; examining the child's capacity to doubt his/her own existence; the acknowledgement of the conceptual difference and the empirical inseparable unity between the mind and the body; definition of the criterion of truth and the classification of the types of knowledge; judgements about the almighty subject; the distinction between physical objects and subjective images they produce - judgements about dreams and reality. Part 3 Children's reasonings about metaphysical problems of a human being; psychology; freedom; Faust; unconscious; inner world; eternal life; reality; the development of a metaphysical knowledge in general - a general view.