Reviews for A System of Synthetic Philosophy - First Principles

The average rating for A System of Synthetic Philosophy - First Principles based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-10 00:00:00 Omen Hussein I came to this thinking that phenomenologists don't have anything to say about pedagogy. I still think this. If reading Piaget you thought, "I wish he spent more time on anal sadism" then maybe this is for you. It's full of cringe inducing psychoanalysis of primitive people and their chaotic masturbating mothers and entirely abstract discussions of imagined children. Perhaps mixing the Mirror Stage with a richer consideration of embodiment was innovative at the time but it's ultimately pretty thin here. I know Merleu-Ponty got rid of all this Talcott Parsons stuff later. The Husserl critique in the middle is good, as with all the stuff when he's on home ground, but a pedagogy it does not make. If you want a helpful and thorough critique of Piaget and Koffka for pedagogy, read Vygotsky. He is prevented from offering a pedagogy from the start since he thinks perception precedes intelligence in driving development through imitation. As Tomasello among others have now shown, this is empirically false. I think he just doesn't care about kids very much.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-21 00:00:00 Susan Mcgonnell I’m gonna take credit for reading this, because, heck, I made it through this thing. I should probably appreciate it more because it was very helpful in my class, but I still want to burn it alive. *pumps fist at numbers*