This text offers a survey of approaches to the development of moral reasoning - those of Freud, ego psychology, Piaget and Kohlberg. The book argues that the impressive nature of Kohlberg's later evidence for his view that moral reasoning passes through a sequence of stages is in part illusory, because his theory predicts that specific types of reply will show specific developmental patterns. However, as data are always reported in terms of stages, which amalgamate very disparate types of reply, it is impossible to know whether the specific types of reply follow their predicted developmental...

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) was one of the most significant and influential psychologists of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, true appreciation of his theories has been hindered by a lack of understanding of the background to his thought.
Vygotsky's Developmental and Educational Psychology aims to demonstrate how we can come to a new and original understanding of Vygotsky's theories through knowledge of their cultural, philosophical and historical context. Beginning with the main philosophical influences of Marxist and Hegelian thought, this book leads the reader through Vygotsky's life...

General Argument My aim is to survey some of the most influential philosophical writers on human nature from the time that Augustine codified Christian belief to the present. During this period philosophical opinions about human nature underwent a transformation from the God-centered views of Augustine and the scholastics to the human-centered ideas of Nietzsche, Freud and Sartre. While one aim has simply been to provide a handy survey, I do have three polemical purposes. One is to oppose the notion that the modernism of more recent writers was produced by methodological innovations....

Vygotsky is widely considered one of the most significant and influential psychologists of the 20th century. Here the author demonstrates how we can come to a new and original understanding of Vygotsky's theories through knowledge of their cultural, philosophical and historical context.

The first part of the book offers a survey of current approaches to the development of moral reasoning: those of Freud, ego psychology, Piaget and Kohlberg. The approach of Kohlberg has been popular because he was able to give an impressive account of findings from the key method of interviews, the other crucial method being naturalistic observation of moral discourse. The accounts of interview evidence given by ego psychology and Piaget were less comprehensive and less impressive. Naturalistic studies have either been impressionistic or less detailed in their methods of analysis.
The...