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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Social & political philosophy
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The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century (Paperback)
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The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century (Paperback)
Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century explores disabled
people who lived in the eighteenth century. The first four essays
consider philosophical writing dating between 1663 and 1788, when
the understanding of disability altered dramatically. We begin with
Margaret Cavendish, whose natural philosophy rejected ideas of
superiority or inferiority between individuals based upon physical
or mental difference. We then move to John Locke, the founder of
empiricism in 1680, who believed that the basis of knowledge was
observability, but who, faced with the lack of anything to observe,
broke his own epistemological rules in his explanation of mental
illness. Understanding the problems that empiricism set up, Anthony
Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, turned in 1711 to moral
philosophy, but also founded his philosophy on a flaw. He believed
in the harmony of "the aesthetic trinity of beauty, truth, and
virtue" but he could not believe that a disabled friend, whom he
knew to have been moral before his physical alteration, could
change inside. Lastly, we explore Thomas Reid who in 1788 returned
to the body as the ground of philosophical enquiry and saw the body
as a whole-complete in itself and wanting nothing, be it missing a
sense (Reid was deaf) or a physical or mental capacity. At the
heart of the study of any historical artifact is the question of
where to look for evidence, and when looking for evidence of
disability, we have largely to rely upon texts. However, texts come
in many forms, and the next two essays explore three types-the
novel, the periodical and the pamphlet-which pour out their ideas
of disability in different ways. Evidence of disabled people in the
eighteenth century is sparse, and the lives the more evanescent.
The last four essays bring to light little known disabled people,
or people who are little known for their disability, giving various
forms of biographical accounts of Susanna Harrison, Sarah Scott,
Priscilla Poynton and Thomas Gills, who are all but forgotten in
the academic world as well as to public consciousness.
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