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The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century (Hardcover)
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The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century (Hardcover)
Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850
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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, a time
in which 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 turn to Thomas Reid who
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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