Field Notes on the Naturalization and Denaturalization of Disability in (Feminist) Philosophy

Abstract

In this article, I offer an account of how the individualized and medicalized conception of disability that prevails in philosophy is naturalized in bioethics, cognitive science, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and other subfields of the discipline. By the end of the article, I will have both indicated how disabled people are constituted in philosophical discourse as a problem to be rectified or eliminated and explained how the prevalence in philosophy of this naturalized conception of disability contributes to and reinforces the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession of philosophy. Critical philosophical work on disability is an important means with which to resist and subvert this exclusion.

Keywords

• apparatus of disability
• cognitive science
• disabled philosophers
• feminist bioethics
• exclusion
• Foucault