Patrick Frierson

What I'm up to these days...

This Fall (2024), I am teaching three courses at Whitman College: the Senior Seminar for the new Ethics and Society major at Whitman, a First Year Seminar on The Body, 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 third 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.) 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. This semester, I'm also maintaining a part time position with the new doctoral program in Montessori Studies at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

My own scholarship continues to hum along. My first book on Maria Montessori's philosophy -- Intellectual Agency and Virtue Epistemology: A Montessori Perspective -- was recently issued in paperback, and my second Montessori book -- Montessori's Moral Philosophy -- just came out in paperback this past May. I'm finishing up a third book on Montessori (for Oxford) -- Maria Montessori's Philosophy: Following the Child -- laying out her philosophy as a whole and showing how Montessori developed a distinctive philosophical methodology, what I call "pedagogical naturalism". Meanwhile, I continue to work on Immanuel Kant, Anne Conway, Rene Descartes, Adam Smith, and others. I've lately become fascinated by Sor Juana de la Cruz's Primero Sueno and hope to do more work on that, and other topics in Mexican philosophy, in the near future.

"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 )