Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Children [Paperback]

The study of early cognitive development has emphasized the way in which young children act like scientists, testing and revising theories about the physical, biological, and psychological world. Evidence of this early understanding of the natural order has led researchers to reconsider children's thinking about magical, religious, or otherwise supernatural orders. The present volume offers reviews of new lines of research on children's thinking that stretch beyond the ordinary boundaries of reality. More than being "little scientists," children are here considered as "little magicians," "little metaphysicians," "little theologians" and "little story tellers" or "dramatists," imagining other-worldly possibilities.

Paul L. Harris is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education at Harvard University. He is a graduate of Sussex and Oxford Universities and has previously taught at the University of Lancaster, the Free University of Amsterdam, the London School of Economics, and Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. A developmental psychologist with interests in the development of cognition, emotion and imagination, Harris is currently studying how young children learn about history, science and religion on the basis of what trusted informants tell them, rather than from firsthand observation. He is the author of The Work of the Imagination (2000).