I welcome private and public nominations for my weekly, most-underrated philosopher of the week entry! Here are the rules: 1. no dead people; 2. no people currently or about to be employed in a Leiter top 50 (or equivalent) department (even thought these are also filled with underrated folk); 3. no former dissertation advisors, or other teachers from graduate school; 4. no former students; 5. No untenured folk. 6a: Excellence in more than one AOS; 6b: noticeable public impact. (That is I want to recognize *interesting* philosophers, not just hyperspecialized ones!)
I have known this week's most underrated philosopher of the week, Patrick Frierson, since my first years of graduate school. (Patrick, who teaches at Whitman College, is a graduate of Notre Dame, but he lived in Hyde Park for a while.) He was the first nice Kantian ethicist I met, and for a long time the only nice one. Patrick turned his dissertation into an impressive and regularly cited book, Freedom and Anthropology in Kant's Moral Philosophy, which was not the first to look at Kant's anthropology, but certainly among the first to integrate successfully Kant's metaphysics and ethics with his anthropological (and religious) writings. He has continued writing on Kant with clarity and insight. One of my favorite pieces is the one on the implications of Kant's account of mental disorder.
Patrick's work has always been broader than Kant scholarship. He has published a fine paper on Descartes' neglected ethics. Along the way Patrick has mined the work of Adam Smith to developed a highly original take on environmental ethics.
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