Patrick Frierson

What I'm up to these days...

This academic year (2025-2026), I am taking a sabbatical, primarily to develop a new area of competence in Mexican philosophy (and more broadly Latin American philosophy). I expect to do some writing and presenting on amazing Mexican philosophers like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, José María Luis Mora, Laureana Wright de Kleinhaus, Justo Sierra, José María Vigil, José Vasconcelos, Antonio Caso, and many others. I also continue working on other important historical philosophers such as Descartes, Smith, Conway, Kant, and Montessori. I'm delighted to say that my third book on Montessori, Maria Montessori's Philosophy: Following the Child , has just been 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 more recent work on Montessori's philosophy. 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

"The greatest concern of the human being is to know how to properly fulfill his station in creation and to rightly understand what one must do in order to be a human being." (Immanuel Kant, from a set of handwritten notes written in 1764 in his personal< copy of Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime, Ak. 20:41 )