Friedman has done historical work on figures in continental philosophy such as Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer.
He also serves as the co-director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University.
It also won the Lakatos Award from the London School of Economics to recognize outstanding work in philosophy of science.
"[6] UC Berkeley German philosophy professor Hans Sluga described Friedman's 2000 book A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, a book that detailed the philosophies of Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, as "eye-opening" and "ambitious".
[7] In his book Dynamics of Reason, Friedman "provides the fullest account to date not only of [his] neo-Kantian, historicized, dynamical conception of relativized a priori principles of mathematics and physics, but also of the pivotal role that [he] sees philosophy as playing in making scientific revolutions rational.