Sarah Woolwine

John Dewey’s theory of communication supplies the basis for a response to the exclusion of the experiential perspectives of persons with intellectual disabilities and those on whom they depend for advocacy and care in philosophical conversations about intellectual disability. Drawing from the work of Licia Carlson and Eva Feder Kittay, we shall begin by exploring some assumptions about epistemic authority which appear to motivate this problematic pattern. We will show that Dewey’s understanding of communication provides tools for explaining how firsthand accounts of living with intellectual disability or caring for someone who does can guide philosophical inquiries about intellectual disability.

In this chapter, we critique a concept of resilience that has emerged from contemporary positive psychology and its application to health education. We argue that the present popularity of “resilience” as a strategy for managing mental health discourages educational institutions from providing students with the mental health services they need. Using the tools of American pragmatism, especially the work of John Dewey, we criticize the paradigm of resilience and identify several concrete reformulations of disability studies which would make concrete differences in the lives of those with mental disability.

This article responds to two ethical conundrums associated with the practice of disability passing. One of these problems is the question of whether or not passing as abled is morally wrong in that it constitutes deception. The other, related difficulty arises from the tendency of the able-bodied in contemporary society to reinforce the activity of passing despite its frequent condemnation as a form of pretense or fraud. We draw upon recent scholarship on transgender and disability passing to criticize and explore some alternatives to the problematic theory of personal identity that is presupposed by the claim that passing as abled always amounts to deceit. We additionally demonstrate the moral indefensibility of society’s reinforcement of disability passing by showing that it may derive, at least in part, from ablest assumptions concerning distributive justice as it relates to disabled individuals.