A major theme of Vygotsky's research in the loiter pan of his life was the theme of concept forma... more A major theme of Vygotsky's research in the loiter pan of his life was the theme of concept formation or conceptual development in child development. He argued that the acquisition of mature scientific (academic) concepts forms the crowning achievement of adolescsence. Mature conceptual thinking positively influences the cognitive domain bul also the aesthetic reactions and emotions. Conversely, the breakdown of conceptual thinking in pathology will lead to severe intellectual impairment but also to emotional dullness etc. In this paper it is claimed that this view is highly interesting but a number of criticisms are raised. Specifically, it is argued that (Ij the resulting view is overly rationalistic; (2) the notion of scientific concepts seems to imply a somewhat static view of science; and (3) Vygotsky was perhaps too optimistic about the possibility of transfer of scientific (conceptual) thinking to other domains. In the last two years of his life Vygotsky lectured and published on many and diverse subjects and at first sight the collection of these subjects does not seem to make a coherent whole but rather resembles a disorderly set of topics, as if someone took them at haphazard from his well-stocked files or bookshelves. Vygotsky dealt with, among other things, schi-zophrenia and Pick's disease, mental retardation, the peculiarities of written language, the concept of age period or stage, the connection between education and development, the role of play in mental development, the concept of consciousness, theories of emotions, scientific and everyday concepts, development and loss, the problem of the localisation of mental functions in the brain, and the diagnostics of cognitive development. Apart from that he published overviews of the main contemporary currents and concepts of psychology and paedology and prefaces to books by Koffka, Gesell, and Piaget. This impressive list testifies of Vygotsky's versatile mind and few modern researchers would venture to publish on so many and diverse topics. However, on further inspection, it turns out that these topics are much more connected than it would seem at first sight and that Vygotsky actually applied his thinking concerning certain key concepts of psychology to various areas. The most central concept of Vygotsky's
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