ABSTRACT
At the age of 21, Jean Piaget, the renowned student of human development, wrote a prescient work entitled Recherche (Exploration). In this personal journal, presented in the form of a novel, the hero Sebastian resolves an adolescent religious crisis by adopting an “unshakable faith” in science. Inspired by his studies in biology, Sebastian dreams of “a course synthesizing the sciences of life” with a privileged niche for psychology and the theory of knowledge. Through his fictional shadow, Piaget explored for the first time the possibilities of a biological explanation of mental processes, even introducing equilibration – his fundamental mechanism for explaining cognitive changes.
