Patrick Frierson

What I'm up to these days...

This Fall, I'm teaching Modernity, Ethics, and a new seminar called What is the Human Being?.

My current research includes an article on Kant's philosophy of religion, a series of papers on Adam Smith and Environmental Ethics, and a book called What is the Human Being?, which compares Kant's answer to this question to alternatives from his day to our own. I'm also finishing an edited collection of translations of Kant's work from the mid-1760s, entitled Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings.

"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 )