British Journal for the History of Philosophy Maria Montessori's Epistemology

Abstract

ISSN: 0960-8788 (Print) 1469-3526 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbjh20 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 paper lays out the epistemology of Maria Montessori (1870–1952). Montessori was initially trained as a medical doctor and is most famous today as the founder of the educational movement that bears her name. But in the critical years when she transitioned from medicine to pedagogy, as she sought 'to deepen and broaden [her] conception' of 'pedagogy and of the prin-ciples upon which it is based', she 'registered as a student of philosophy at the 1 I thank Whitman College for providing a sabbatical and both the Earhart Foundation and the Spencer Foundation (grant number 201400173) for financial support for this project. Robert Roberts and Jason Baehr provided extremely helpful comments on a very early draft of this paper, and the anonymous reviewers for British Journal of the History of Philosophy as well as Michael Beaney (the editor) improved it in its final stages. Thanks too to the students in my Education and Autonomy classes at Whitman who inspired me to pursue more sustained work on Montessori's philosophy. I am extremely grateful to my partner and children for their patience with me while my reading and writing about children distracted me from my respon-sibilities to my own. And finally, I thank my parents for providing the kind of childhood that made me the philosopher I am today.