The eldest son of the Swiss Arthur Piaget and the French Rebecca Jackson, Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, a city in French-speaking Switzerland. His father was a leading professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. His maternal grandfather, James Jackson, was the creator of the first crucible steel factory in France. Jean Piaget was a precocious child who developed an early interest in biology and the natural world, especially molluscs. At the age of 11, while he was studying at the Latino Institute in his hometown, he wrote a study referring to a certain species of albino sparrow and later wrote a treatise on malacology during his high school studies. He graduated and doctorated in natural sciences at the University of Neuchâtel in 1918, with a thesis on the molluscs of the canton of Valais. Until his transfer to Paris in 1919, he worked for a brief period at the University of Zurich where he published two papers on Psychology. At that time his interest in Psychoanalysis began, a context in which he also delved into the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. He was analyzed by Sabina Spielrein (years later he would attend the Congress of Psychoanalysis in Berlin in 1922, where he also met Freud personally).
His main influences, in addition to those of Alfred Binet, were those of James Mark Baldwin, from whom he took the notions of adaptation by assimilation and accommodation in circularity (circularity can be understood as feedback). Through Baldwin he received the influence of Spencer's evolutionary philosophy, a philosophy directly imbued with Darwin's theory. Piaget thus undertook his theorizing and achieved his discoveries having a perspective that is at the same time biological, logical and psychological, coming together in a new epistemology. That is why he talks about a genetic epistemology, understanding here epistemology, not as the branch of philosophy that studies science, but as the investigation of cognitive abilities (in an absolutely empirical way, which also differentiates it from Gnoseology). Regarding the use of the genetic concept, it does not refer so much to the field of biology that studies genes, but rather to the investigation of the genesis of thinking in humans, although Piaget certainly recognizes that such a genesis of thinking has a large proportion ( though by no means entirely) patterns that derive from genes. However, and it is one of Piaget's great discoveries, thinking unfolds from a genetic base only through sociocultural stimuli, just as thinking is configured by the information that the subject receives, information that the subject always learns in a different way. active, no matter how unconscious and passive the processing of information may seem.
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