Originally published in 2003, this book offers a comprehensive account of Kant's theory of freedom and his moral anthropology. The point of departure is the apparent conflict between three claims to ...which Kant is committed: that human beings are transcendentally free, that moral anthropology studies the empirical influences on human beings, and that more anthropology is morally relevant. Frierson shows why this conflict is only apparent. He draws on Kant's transcendental idealism and his theory of the will and describes how empirical influences can affect the empirical expression of one's will in a way that is morally significant but still consistent with Kant's concept of freedom. As a work which integrates Kant's anthropology with his philosophy as a whole, this book will be an unusually important source of study for all Kant scholars and advanced students of Kant.
After showing discipline's centrality in Kant's pedagogy, I briefly highlight Montessori's alternative and then turn to three fundamental differences between Kant and Montessori that partly explain ...their divergent accounts. My goal is not to assess whether Kant or Montessori gets the role of discipline ‘right’, but to highlight broader stakes of their disagreement and ways deeper features of Kant's psychology and moral theory ground his emphasis on discipline.
These remarks focus on Kraus’s claim that for Kant the category of substance cannot apply to the soul but that instead we can and should apply a merely regulative idea of the soul. While granting ...Kraus’s contention that we require an idea of the soul in order to investigate inner experience, I argue that the category of substance nonetheless applies to the soul, but that the notion of the soul as entirely non-corporeal is a regulative idea. To explore this contention, I closely examine two crucial passages Kraus uses to argue against parity between inner and outer sense.
Throughout his life, Kant was concerned with questions about empirical psychology. He aimed to develop an empirical account of human beings, and his lectures and writings on the topic are ...recognizable today as properly 'psychological' treatments of human thought and behavior. In this book Patrick R. Frierson uses close analysis of relevant texts, including unpublished lectures and notes, to study Kant's account. He shows in detail how Kant explains human action, choice, and thought in empirical terms, and how a better understanding of Kant's psychology can shed light on major concepts in his philosophy, including the moral law, moral responsibility, weakness of will, and cognitive error. Frierson also applies Kant's accounts of mental illness to contemporary philosophical issues. His book will interest students and scholars of Kant, the history of psychology, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of action.
This article draws on Martha Nussbaum's distinction between basic, internal, and external (or combined) capacities to better specify possible locations for children's ‘incapacity’ for autonomy. I ...then examine Maria Montessori's work on what she calls ‘normalization’, which involves a release of children's capacities for autonomy and self‐governance made possible by being provided with the right kind of environment. Using Montessori, I argue that, in contrast to many ordinary and philosophical assumptions, children's incapacities for autonomy are best understood as consequences of an absence of external conditions necessary for children to exercise capacities they already have internally, rather than intrinsic limitations based on their stage of life. In a closing section, I show how Montessori proposes a model wherein both children and adults have autonomy, power, and responsibility, but over different spheres, and suggest implications of these differences for who has responsibility for establishing the conditions under which children can flourish.
Frierson briefly lay out the core components of Kantian positive psychology, along the lines of the moral anthropology described in the quotation above. He focuses on the broad outlines of such an ...anthropology rather than specific principles, experimental procedures, or the like. While sticking relatively close to Kant's own accounts of moral anthropology, Frierson's ultimate goal is not to defend his particular empirical claims but to outline the overall framework of his approach.
This paper shows how Maria Montessori's thought can enrich contemporary virtue epistemology. After a short overview of her 'interested empiricist' epistemological framework, I discuss four ...representative intellectual virtues: sensory acuity, physical dexterity, intellectual love, and intellectual humility. Throughout, I show how Montessori bridges the divide between reliabilist and responsibilist approaches to the virtues and how her particular treatments of virtues offer distinctive and compelling alternatives to contemporary accounts. For instance, she emphasizes how sensory acuity is a virtue for which one can be responsible, highlights the embodied nature of cognition through a focus on physical dexterity, interprets intellectual love as a way of loving the world rather than as a love that takes knowledge as its object, and presents an alternative account of intellectual humility to contemporary emphases on the interpersonal dimensions of this virtue.
Maria Montessori's Epistemology Frierson, Patrick R.
British journal for the history of philosophy,
07/2014, Letnik:
22, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper lays out the epistemology of Maria Montessori (1870-1952). I start with what I call Montessori's 'interested empiricism', her empiricist emphasis on the foundational role of the senses ...combined with her (broadly Jamesian) insistence that all cognition is infused with 'interest'. I then discuss the unconscious. Partly because of her emphasis on early childhood, Montessori puts great emphasis on unconscious cognitive processes and develops a conceptual vocabulary to make sense of the continuity between conscious and unconscious processes. The final sections turn to two brief but important applications of this general epistemic framework, the importance of 'meditation' as an epistemic practice and Montessori's accounts of epistemic virtues.
This volume collects Kant's most important ethical and anthropological writings from the 1760s, before he developed his critical philosophy. The materials presented here range from the Observations, ...one of Kant's most elegantly written and immediately popular texts, to the accompanying Remarks which Kant wrote in his personal copy of the Observations and which are translated here in their entirety for the first time. This edition also includes little-known essays as well as personal notes and fragments that reveal the emergence of Kant's complex philosophical ideas. Those familiar with Kant's later works will discover a Kant interested in the 'beauty' as well as the 'dignity' of humanity, in human diversity as well as the universality of morals, and in practical concerns rather than abstract philosophizing. Readers will be able to see Kant's development from the Observations through the Remarks towards the moral philosophy that eventually made him famous.
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