Maria Montessori's Epistemology

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.