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To a reader like myself who is not already knowledgeable about the philosophy of structuralism, Piaget's little book is hard going. Though he makes an effort to sketch the developments that interest him in the fields of mathematics, logic, physics, psychology, genetics, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and philosophy, Piaget is really talking to the respective specialists, and the general reader may feel like a child allowed to stay up late among adults who are discussing matters that almost make sense. Nobody will be hurt by the intellectual teasing. And anyway I doubt that technical abstruseness has much to do with the real difficulty for the reader, which is to decide what Piaget is writing about.
He is writing, of course, about structures. And at the beginning he tells what structures are. They are “systems of transformation” which are characterized by “wholeness” and “self-regulation.” At that point the reader may be able to rough out an image of something that fits this description—an organism, for instance. But then when an example is drawn from mathematics, he will have to conceive of a subject matter which embraces algebra and turtles. It is not an easy task.
I think the reason that Piaget's subject matter is so hard to pin down is that while the discussion is about technical developments in the various sciences, the underlying concerns are the major problems of speculative philosophy. Among these problems Piaget deals indirectly with the following: (1) The problem of substance and essences: What constitutes a separate thing? (2) The problem of