Time to (un)learn: Rethinking philosophy through Disability Studies

Abstract

In this article I will not try to answer the question what philosophy can say on, and do for, disability, but rather what Disability Studies can say on, and do for, contemporary philosophy and especially for philosophers, who seem to keep understanding the word “philosophy” solely according to the meaning that has been crystallized during the development of Western Modernity: a “scientific discipline” beside all others, bound to obey to codified ways of thinking and methods. Because of that, philosophers usually continue to miss the main point raised by the non-philosophical field of inquiry  known under the general label “Disability Studies”, that is, the idea that “disability” – rather than a natural fact or condition – is a product of a process of disablement, whose genealogy, fundamental assumptions and consequences could and should, instead, be the focus of philosophical analysis.