As we come to recognize more and more the occlusions that occur in, and often constitute, philosophy and its history, attention to an ableist presupposition in philosophy has come to the fore. Much as with feminist theory or queer theory or race theory, disability theory not only works to expose the ableist presuppositions of philosophy but also to alter philosophy for the better by the inclusion of the formerly excluded. Why are affordances– social, political, moral, and physical– made for some types of bodies, but denied to others? Have we yet grasped what different types of bodies can really do? What is the difference between a “disability” and an “impairment”? To what degree is our category “disability” more philosophical than it is corporeal?

Our guest for this episode, Dr. Joel Reynolds, is the perfect person with whom to talk about these questions and issues! Dr. Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Advisor to The Hastings Center, Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation, and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program. He is the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society from Oxford University Press. In 2022, he published The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality.

You can read/download a full transcript of this conversation in this episode at this link. 

In the course of our conversation, we reference the following thinkers, texts, ideas, etc:

• Alex Burgess et al (Eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics (Oxford UP, 2020)
• Sarah Buder and Rose Perry, “The Social Model of Disability Explained” (Social Creatures, 2021)
• Rhoda Alkin, “Conceptualizing disability: Three models of disability” (American Psychological Association, 2022)
• Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept” (Hypatia, 2011)
• Sara Hendren, What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World (Penguin/Random House, 2020)
• Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” (NWSA Journal, 2002)
• Saling House
• Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke UP, 2017)
• Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford UP, 2016)
• Juvenile Tay-Sachs disease
• Down’s syndrome, Edwards’ syndrome, and Patau’s syndrome
• Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The extended mind” (Analysis, 1988)
• Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931)
• Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954)
• “Invisible” disabilities
• Society for  Disability Studies
• United States National Council on Disability
• Philosopher Teresa Blankmeyer Burke
• Philosopher Eva Feder Kittay
• Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (Routledge, 1997)
• Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (Routledge, 1995)
• transcript of this episode