Humana Mente-Journal of Philosophical Studies

A Cartography of Philosophy on/of Disability

2025-09-12

Chiara Montalti, Brunella Casalini

Deconstruction or Reinforcement? How Modernist Disability Aesthetics Did or Did Not Challenge Historical Normates

2025-07-30

Ager Perez Casanovas

This paper aims to examine how disability as a trope has been a constant in Modern Art practices, and to what extent this presence constituted a challenge or a reinforcement of social representations and conceptions of disability. This analysis aims to assess how those tropes can be appropriated by contemporary Disability Justice-informed artistic practices that want to challenge historical normates as the only acceptable representation of beauty. These practices - such as Carmen Papalia, Nomy Lamm or Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi - advocate for Crip beauty and joy in the arts as a space for resistance that can lead to social changes that make space for Disabled bodyminds in the public sphere. First, we will provide some pragmatic characterization of the major concepts at play when connecting Modernisms, disability aesthetics, and contemporary Disability Justice artistic practice. This will take us back to the constructions of Classical Normates in the first century BC, with the Vitruvian man being an early manifestation of a Normate (Hamraie, 2017; Garland-Thomson, 1997, 2009), a construct that will serve as a paradigm to examine how such Normates are associated with a biopolitical impulse to trace a border between normalcy and otherness (Mitchell & Snyder, 2001), which is present in representations of the normative and the disabled body in all artistic forms - in the visual arts, but also literature and music (Straus, 2018), and in representations of the body in medical and technological disciplines. Secondly, it will be argued that the primacy of Normates in such representations experiences a shift with the rise of Modernism, where there is a centrality of Disability Aesthetics, associated with a growing interest in the disabled bodymind by avant-garde artists (Siebers, 2010; Millet-Gallant, 2010) that is palpable when revisiting the period from the lens of Critical Disability Studies (Cachia, 2020). In parallel, it is worth contextualizing how this shift coincides with a transformation in the philosophical conception of the human condition towards a focus on embodiment and flesh which finds its most explicit formulation in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). Finally, I will propose that the modernist tendency towards representations of the disabled bodymind culminates in contemporary artistic movements based on Disability Justice, which wield the final blow to classical Normates by transforming the locus of representation of the non-normative bodies in the artists from a first-person stance that celebrates beauty and joy (Berne et al., 2019). However, it is relevant to consider a fundamental difference between the organizational modes of Modernist isms and contemporary Disability Justice artistic practice - in terms of the ways of socializing, producing, and distributing the arts that emerge from these very different artistic systems. In the last part of the chapter, I argue for an intrinsic and systemic difference that enables us to regulate the proximities and distances among a lineage of modernist tropes to which we can trace back disability aesthetics, and its current forms of being.

From pathology to Affirmation: Disability Philosophy in Everyday Life

2025-07-30

Dan Goodley, Katherine Runswick-Cole, Rebecca Lawthom, Bojana Daw Srdanovic, Nikita Hayden

This paper argues for an affirmative disability philosophy and research methodology. Even after four decades of critical disability studies we worry that much of what we encounter in public spaces - in relation to disability - on a day to day basis remains untouched by this critical scholarship. With reference to a composite narrative emerging from two research projects - and our own personal entanglements - we consider the dominant ways in which everyday philosophies of disability threaten to pathologise people with learning disabilities as objects and counter these by offering an  alternative affirmative philosophy. We explore disability as affirmation - humane, unbounded and full to bursting with potential - a way of knowing disability that should be a regular feature of common parlance -and philosophical discourse - but a form of knowing that requires on being informed by disabled people and critical disability studies scholarship. We explore the ways in which inserting disability-as-affirmation into everyday conversations and public life can have significant wider societal impacts - in and outside of academia - through offering a more expansive philosophy of disability.

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

2025-07-30

Flavia Monceri

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.

Epistemology from Disability, Epistemology of Disability

2025-07-28

Chiara Montalti

The article aims to explore in which terms disability represents a resource of knowledge, both in the personal and scientific domains. Specifically, the intertwinement of these two domains is conveyed by the reference to the recent concept of ‘cripistemology’. In the first section, I will explain why this analysis is needed, pointing out that disabled people are routinely dispossessed of knowledge and victims of epistemic injustice and exclusion. I will consider how social epistemology has largely ignored disability, even though it is used as a prosthetic rhetoric device in a part of this literature. I will examine how often disabled people are deemed incompetent, and more specifically two cases in which they are not regarded as epistemic authorities on their own experience of disability: when speaking about their well-being and when participating in medical exchanges. I will then address hermeneutical injustice on disability, mainly focusing on the scarce diffusion of the concept of ‘ableism’ – an essential political and sociocultural epistemic resource. I will also identify cases of material epistemic exclusion: in particular, how segregation and isolation significantly harm disabled people. In the second section, I will consider two forms of epistemic reparation or resistance. Firstly, I will examine the epistemic standpoint of disability, considering how experience leads to specific personal expertise in creating access, orienting technoscience, and managing pain. Secondly, I will consider disability as an epistemological standpoint, examining how it can positively impact the critical analyses of it conducted by disability studies. In this regard, I will identify disabled people’s position as ‘epistemological susceptibility’. Namely, disabled scholars do possibly have an epistemic privilege, but further factors elicited specifically by the category of disability must be addressed.