Patrick R. Frierson

This Fall (2026), I'll be teaching three courses at Whitman College: the Senior Seminar for the new Ethics and Society major at Whitman, a course on Environmental Ethics, and a required history of philosophy course in Modern European Philosophy, where I use Lisa Shapiro and Marcy Lascano's new anthology to both broaden students' sense of the canon of modern philosophy and to give them more ownership over the course. (This will be my fourth time using this particular text; one of my favorite comments from my evaluations for that course read "Thank you! This was my favourite class this semester, I learned so much and because it was my first exposure to Modern Euro Phil, I view that time period as having lots of women who made huge contributions." Many kudos to Shapiro and Lascano for an innovative new way of presenting modern European philosophy that has the potential to totally transform how students see what the history of philosophy is and can be.) This year, I've added a page with additional materials that are not in the anthology, based largely on work that I did at the amazing Center for Canon Expansion and Change at the University of Minnesota (shout out to Dwight Lewis Jr. and Jessica Gordon-Roth!). Along similar lines, I continue to offer to students the option of taking my on-demand course entitled Philosophy Without Gaps, based on Peter Adamson's podcast series on the history of philosophy.

In the Spring, I'll be teaching a new course on Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education, a seminar/tutorial on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and a substantially revised version of my course on Mexican Philosophy. That course is still under construction, but I'm very excited to be including a host of new characters in that last course, including folks like Antonio Rubio, Alonso de Vera Cruz, Juan Benito Diaz de Gamarra, Maria Leona Vicario, Miguel Macedo, Jose Maria Vigil, Emilia Rimbio, and (I hope) Laura Mendez de Cuenca. For many of these, I'll be making available translations on my website.

My third book on Montessori, Maria Montessori's Philosophy: Following the Child, was recently published by Oxford University Press. See too the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Montessori, and my recent Synthese article on Montessori and extended cognition, co-authored with Laura Di Paolo, for recent work on Montessori's philosophy. I'm currently working on a volume on Montessori for the Her Life in Five Ideas series Kristin Gjesdal and Dalia Nassar are editing for Oxford.

For other recent work on Modern European philosophy, check out my contribution on Descartes and Spinoza to Love: A History or my chapter on "The Extraordinary Unity of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment" in the Cambridge Critical Guide on the Critique of the Power of Judgment. I'm currently working on a monograph on Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and a project exploring Kant's ideas about deafness, inner sense, and concept formation, and I have some papers on Anne Conway, Rene Descartes, and Adam Smith simmering on the back burner.

I've also begun doing some scholarly work in the history of Mexican philosophy, including several papers on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (one on Eurocentrism presented at the APA Pacific in 2025), several papers on Jose Maria Luis Mora (including one co-written with Karina Villa Ortiz and presented at the Eastern APA in 2026), a paper on Jose Maria Vigil's anti-positivism, some work on Jose Vasconcelos (mostly working with Emiliano Salomon), and a paper on Emilia Rimbio and Mexican positivism (which I plan to present at SMAP at the Eastern APA in 2027). Mostly, though, I'm excited to be refining my syllabus on Mexican philosophy, with translations of often-ignored texts and figures.