Nate Whelan-Jackson

Buen Vivir is a postdevelopment philosophy enshrined in Ecuador's 2008 Constitution, which offers an alternative to neoliberal development frameworks. This paper examines the distinctive features of Buen Vivir and associated reforms regarding disabled people's rights, alongside Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ analysis of “ecology of knowledges,” to suggest that the outlook offers important resources for theorizing disabled people's active role in shaping shared notions of living well. These reforms uphold epistemic ideals of solidarity and the possibility of developing embodied knowledges that can further contribute to the life of the community. Buen Vivir is both a goal, living with rich, meaningful relationships in a pluralistic society, and a process, developing the knowledges that can inform the expression of those relationships. As such, Buen Vivir motivates creating the conditions that allow for disabled persons to participate in processes creating new knowledges that shape meanings of disability and good ways of living.

This paper elucidates the pragmatist elements of Thomas Reid's approach to the justification of first principles by reference to Charles S. Peirce. Peirce argues that first principles are justified by their surviving a process of ‘self-criticism’, in which we come to appreciate that we cannot bring ourselves to doubt these principles, in addition to the foundational role they play in inquiries. The evidence Reid allows first principles bears resemblance to surviving the process of self-criticism. I then argue that this evidence allows Reid and Peirce a way out of the dilemma between dogmatism and skepticism regarding the justification of such principles, insofar as they are epistemically, and not solely practically, justified

shortly after i wake up, I put braces on my legs. I wear them throughout the day. Often, I don't notice them. If I'm walking on a flat surface, they often fade into the background of my consciousness. I make allowances without thinking about how they structure my gait and the space they take up. Rarely, I misjudge this, and occasionally fall. In those moments, their presence is apparent, coming to the foreground of my experience as a problem, something I need to accommodate as I collapse. When they need to be repaired, I notice them all of the time. As a user of assistive technology, the way in which I experience the technology can swing from regarding them as part of my body, to an external tool, to an object in... Read More.

E-mapping technologies are a recent technological intervention promising to promote accessibility for disabled city residents. As part of their promise, they seem to position disabled people as agents, rather than as merely passive users of a city. Using Quill Kukla’s analysis of cities as “containers for agency,” I suggest that disabled people’s agency as city dwellers is often constrained in unnoticed ways that this technological intervention does not necessarily address. In particular, city life involves movement between different “stances,” or embodied modes of interaction with the environment. I discuss these constraints on spatial agency as enforcing “stances of justification,” pressures to explain or justify our presence, arising out of features of urban life. This analysis motivates new considerations in assessing whether technologies like e-mapping support accessibility and agency, framing our investigation in terms of whether an intervention allows users to take a wider range of stances.

Given basic commitments to philosophize from lived experience and a shared underlying meliorist impulse, American philosophical traditions seem well-suited to develop nascent philosophical engagement with disability studies. To date, however, there have been few efforts to facilitate research at the intersections of American philosophy and disability studies. This volume of essays seeks to offer some directions for propelling this inquiry. Scholars working in pragmatist and other American traditions consider intersections between American philosophy and work in disability studies. Consisting of three broader sections, one set of essays considers how American philosophies from contemporary Mexican philosophy to classical American pragmatism inform descriptions of disability and efforts at liberation. The next offer accounts of how American philosophies disclose alternative conceptions of epistemic and ethical issues surrounding disability. Finally, a section considers "living issues" of disability, including essays on parenting, immigration policy, and art education. Throughout, these works provide direction and orientation for further investigation at the intersection of American philosophies and disability studies.

stuart rosenbaum passed on December 14, 2020. A longtime member of SAAP and leader in other societies, he was well-known to many of us and will be fondly remembered for his kindness, his quiet humor, his insight, and his support of this community. He was a loving father and grandfather who will be deeply missed. For me, he was a mentor with unceasing generosity.Stuart transformed Baylor University’s Philosophy Department by designing and launching the PhD program. In the years before, he had been a crucial part of Baylor’s MA program, and several of his students have gone on to work in colleges and universities. He was the first program director, and after that an encouraging, supportive yet critical presence...

even a brief review of disability narratives shows that many people with disabilities, encompassing a diverse range of impairments, encounter disruptions in their everyday interactions. Individuals with disabilities report that strangers and neighbors alike fail to communicate with them.1 Instead, people defer to friends, partners, and caretakers to offer some command over the interaction. These experiences might be understood as mere annoyances, part of the experience of impairment insofar as it undermines non-disabled individuals’ modes of interaction, leaving them fumbling, seeking assurance that they are handling the situation correctly. But, read less cautiously, these frustrations are emblematic of a...

In his recent book, Creative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values, Hugh McDonald wades into the murky waters of value theory in order to develop a uniquely pragmatist theory of value. He ties value to what he calls "creative actualizations," or the process of introducing novelties, conditions, norms and principles into our individual and collective experience. Creative actualization accommodates a plurality of independent values, resisting the temptation to embrace a monist framework, whether by making our diverse values instrumental to a final end or relative to a single (objective or subjective) source. Moreover, as McDonald argues, creative actualization has the theoretical resources to underpin a ..

Moral particularism, broadly understood, is the position that morality resists codification into a set of rules or principles.1 Jonathan Dancy, particularism's main contemporary proponent, maintains that there are few, if any, true moral principles, and moral reasoning and judgment do not require them. Instead, acts are justified by the salient features of particular situations, and moral reasoning requires attunement to these elements. In rejecting a rule-bound approach to morality, particularists deny pictures of moral education emphasizing knowledge and application of principles. While Dancy offers a competing view of competence, his explanation of the possibility of moral education is inadequate, leaving a...

I argue that John Dewey’s analysis of imagination enables an account of learning from imaginary cases consistent with Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism. Moreover, this account provides a more robust account of learning from cases than Dancy’s own. Particularism is the position that there are no, or at most few, true moral principles, and that competent reasoning and judgment do not require them. On a particularist framework, one cannot infer from an imaginary case that because a feature has a particular moral importance there, that it must have that import in an actual case. Instead, for Dancy, cases can yield “reminders,” and a person with a lot of experience (real or imagined) brings a “checklist” of features that can matter to a situation. Using the Nathan-David exchange from 2 Samuel and Martha Nussbaum’s “Steerforth’s Arm” from Love’s Knowledge, I show that this account does not explain all instances of learning from cases. Drawing on recent work on cases, I argue that cases can be educative by serving an exploratory function, probing what one takes to be known and provoking change in the background one uses in evaluating a situation. I then argue that Dewey’s work on imagination in his comments on sympathy and in A Common Faith and Art as Experience enables such a role for cases on a particularist framework. Mark Johnson’s recent work on metaphor further illuminates how Dewey’s account of art can be exploratory. I contend that this account affords an exploratory role for cases consistent with Dancy’s particularism.

John Dewey’s analyses of habit and tradition enable contemporary moral particularists to make sense of the possibility of moral education. Particularists deny that rules determine an act’s moral worth. Using Jonathan Dancy’s recent work, I present a particularist account of moral competence and call attention to a lacuna in particularism: an account of education. For Dancy, reasoning requires attunement to a situation’s salient features. Dewey’s account of habit explains how features can exhibit salience without appeal to rules, and I look to habituation to outline the possibility of particularist education. Finally, though Dewey’s commitment that habituation occurs in traditions seems in tension with Dancy’s rejection of principles, I argue that this appeal is consistent with particularism. Thus, particularists like Dancy can strengthen the case for their view by situating it in a Deweyan framework.