Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Philosophy & Disability: an overview

Anita Silvers describes a booming area of philosophical enquiry and explains how considering the perspectives of the disabled can help philosophy in general.

Philosophers analyze and assess those ideas they believe to be at the core of everyday thinking. Often they do this by testing commonplace views against counterexamples involving anomalous or uncommon kinds of cases, and then by revising those views accordingly. Michel Foucault referred to this process in his Introduction to Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, commenting that philosophical questions are addressed through “a rationality which … proceeds … by means of partial modification when not by general recasting.” (p.xii)

Views based on so-called normal individuals may neglect or occlude rare, anomalous or under-represented kinds of people.

…