Patrick Frierson

This chapter investigates a Cartesian concept of love that is grounded in rationalist metaphysics, plays an important role in ethical life, and consists of a holistic attitude defined as joining oneself with another “in such a way that we imagine a whole of which we think ourselves to be only one part and the thing loved another” (IX:387). I argue that René Descartes articulates this notion of love but falls short because the unity constitutive of love is inconsistent with core features of his metaphysics. Baruch Spinoza develops a rationalist system within which metaphysical unity among finite substances is a fundamental reality, but once he individuates distinct ethical agents, Spinoza develops an even more egoist and less holist notion of love than Descartes.

In this article, we bring Maria Montessori’s pedagogy into conversation with contemporary developments in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. In particular, we seek to show that Montessori’s “prepared environment” provides a context within which cognitive tasks are performed in the interfaces and interactions among brains, bodies, and concrete mathematical materials. For ease of illustration, we will focus on one particular Montessori material—the “Stamp Game,” used by children of approximately ages 4–7 for ordinary arithmetic. In both cases, our goal is, first, to show the way in which this particular material can be enmeshed with a particular child’s brain and body in order to become capable of complex mathematical operations. In that sense, we argue that the child + stamp-game or child + square-root-board constitutes a case of what contemporary philosophers call “extended cognition,” that is, a “cognitive process … _constituted_ or _realized_ by resources distributed across the brain, the body, and the environment” Kirchhoff & Kiverstein (_Extended consciousness and predictive processing: A third wave view_, 2019, 8). Here we highlight that extended cognitive systems can not merely enact mathematical _operations_ but can actualize mathematical _understanding_.

In “Kant and Degrees of Responsibility,” Joe Saunders claims that “Degrees of responsibility are important for both our moral and legal practices” and argues that “transcendental idealism precludes Kant from vindicating these judgments [about degrees of responsibility]” ; thus, we have reasons to reject Kant’s transcendental idealism. In this paper, I show how Kant’s transcendental idealism can accommodate and provide a metaphysical account for degrees of responsibility. Whether this “vindicates” such judgments depends upon how much one expects a philosophical account to do; I defend modesty there while admitting a reasonable desire for reflection on how we can and should make such judgments. Finally, I raise the question of just how important judgments of moral responsibility are. Rather than looking to metaphysics to figure out how to vindicate judgments about degrees of responsibility, I suggest we look to the practical purposes such judgments serve.

This paper explores the relationship between empirical psychology, transcendental critique, and phenomenology in Kant’s discussion of respect for the moral law, particularly as that is found in the Critique of Practical Reason. I first offer an empirical-psychological reading of moral respect, in the context of which I distinguish transcendental and empirical perspectives on moral action and defend H. J. Paton’s claim that moral motivation can be seen from two points of view, where “from one point of view, [respect] is the cause of our action, but from another point of view the moral law is its ground.” Then, after a discussion of a distinction between first- and second-order transcendental/practical perspectives where reasons for action are first-order practical judgments while the conditions of possibility for those reasons’ authority are expressed in second-order judgments, I turn to a third kind of perspective: the properly phenomenological one. I explain the general notion of Kantian phenomenology with an example of the experience of time from Kant’s Anthropology before applying this to a phenomenological reading of the discussion of respect in the Critique of Practical Reason. I end by noting that on my account, in contrast to that of Jeanine Grenberg, the distinctive phenomenology of respect is not systematically important for grounding claims in moral philosophy.

This paper focuses on responding to Jeanine Grenberg’s claim that my discussion of Kant’s feeling of respect leaves no meaningful room for investigating feeling first-personally. I first make clear that I do think that feelings can be investigated first-personally, both in that they can be prospective reasons for action and in that – at least in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment – there are feelings that we should have. I then show that at the time of writing the “Incentives” chapter of the second Critique, Kant had not yet determined an a priori basis for aesthetic normativity. On this basis, I argue that the “Incentives” chapter provides a sort of consolation prize for not having an transcendental account of feeling. In that sense, it’s a properly transcendental analysis of feeling in which Kant examines feeling from within and a priori to show that there are good reasons to have certain feelings. I end by acknowledging the extent to which, on this reading, I agree with Grenberg that Kant is doing a transcendentally significant form of phenomenology here, while I also highlight some remaining areas of disagreement.

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.

In recent years, several philosophers have used “situationist” findings in social psychology to criticize character-based ethical theories. After showing how these criticisms apply, prima facie, to Kant’s moral theory, I lay out a Kantian response to them. Kant admits the empirical reality of situation-dependence in human actions but articulates a conception of “ought implies can” that vindicates his character-based moral theory in the face of rarity of character. Moreover, he provides an interpretive framework for the situation-dependence of human motivation in terms of humans’ “propensity to evil.” He also provides a framework for highlighting empirical bases for moral hope, a framework that makes it possible to see lack of character as something human beings can overcome. And he outlines a “moral anthropology” that develops something akin to what Mark Alfano calls “moral technologies,” but in Kant’s case, these technologies focus on cultivating character as such rather than merely good behavioral outcomes.

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.

In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have criticized character- or virtue-based normative theories on the basis that human behavior and cognition depend more on situation than on traits of character. This set of criticisms, which initially aimed at broadly Aristotelian virtue theories in ethics, has expanded to target a wide range of approaches in both ethics and, recently, epistemology. In this essay, I draw on the works of Maria Montessori to defend her conception of character and particularly of intellectual virtue in the light of situationist objections. I start with an overview of the situationist challenge before turning to some reasons to think that Montessori’s virtue epistemology might be susceptible to it. I then offer a brief discussion of Montessori’s approach to character. After laying out two ways that Montessori, like recent conservative defenses of virtue epistemology, deflates the significance of situationist findings, I show some ways that Montessori’s virtue epistemology resembles so-called “accommodationist” responses to situationism.

This paper lays out the moral theory of philosopher and educator Maria Montessori (1870–1952). Based on a moral epistemology wherein moral concepts are grounded in a well-cultivated moral sense, Montessori develops a threefold account of moral life. She starts with an account of character as an ideal of individual self-perfection through concentrated attention on effortful work. She shows how respect for others grows from and supplements individual character, and she further develops a notion of social solidarity that goes beyond cooperation toward shared agency. Partly because she attends to children's ethical lives, Montessori highlights how character, respect, and solidarity all appear first as prereflective, embodied orientations of agency. Full moral virtue takes up prereflective orientations reflectively and extends them through moral concepts. Overall, Montessori's ethic improves on features similar to some in Nietzschean, Kantian, Hegelian, or Aristotelian ethical theories while situating these within a developmental and perfectionist ethics.

This paper elucidates the core principles of Maria Montessori's metaphysics. Her attention to embryological, evolutionary, and educational development led to her teleological metaphysics of life. Individual organisms are governed by internally driven, perfectionist, discontinuous teleology. And this individual teleology is integrated into a holistic, ecological context whereby individuals' striving towards perfection works for the increased ordered complexity of the systems of which they are parts. Moreover, Montessori extends this metaphysics of life to include nonliving components of nature, such that atoms, planets, and inorganic molecules are governed by the same general teleological structure.

Frederick Beiser continues to unfold the German philosophical tradition, refusing to let a static and narrowly construed canon of "big names" obscure important philosophical debates in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. Weltschmerz focuses on the pessimism controversy, the debate over "the thesis that life is not worth living, that nothingness is better than being, or that it is worse to be than not be".The most important philosopher in the book is Arthur Schopenhauer. Chapters 1–4 are devoted to Schopenhauer's legacy, metaphysics, pessimism, and "the illusion of redemption." Chapter 1 lays out important information about Schopenhauer's central role in German philosophy in the latter half of the...

This paper lays out the epistemology of Maria Montessori . I start with what I call Montessori's ‘interested empiricism’, her empiricist emphasis on the foundational role of the senses combined with her 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