Philosophy of Disability

3 Credits.

What is disability? Philosophy long treated the answer as obvious: disability was misfortune, a limit case against which theories of the good life could be tested. That confidence has not survived. Beginning with the disability rights movement, activists recast disability as a product of social arrangements rather than a fact about bodies; philosophers took up, refined, and contested that claim; and disabled philosophers turned the discipline's own methods on assumptions it had never thought to defend — that disability makes life worse, that personhood follows cognitive capacity, that the philosopher is nondisabled by default. This course is an introduction to that argument. Each unit opens with foundational texts that gave the field its terms and central debates, then turns to feminist, queer, crip, Black, decolonial, and non-Western scholarship that calls those terms into question. The readings in a given week will often disagree; that is by design. We begin with conceptual foundations — the nature of disability, well-being, personhood, justice — and end with questions medicine cannot avoid: prenatal testing, cure, neurodiversity, rationing, and medical aid in dying. Throughout, disabled thinkers appear not as subjects of these debates but as parties to them.