The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections

✍ Scribed by Licia Carlson

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 286
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In a challenge to current thinking about cognitive impairment, this book explores what it means to treat people with intellectual disabilities in an ethical manner. Reassessing philosophical views of intellectual disability, Licia Carlson shows how we can affirm the dignity and worth of intellectually disabled people first by ending comparisons to nonhuman animals and then by confronting our fears and discomforts. Carlson presents the complex history of ideas about cognitive disability, the treatment of intellectually disabled people, and social and cultural reactions to them. Sensitive and clearly argued, this book offers new insights on recent trends in disability studies and philosophy.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
A Note on Terminology......Page 16
Introduction: The Philosopher’s Nightmare......Page 20
Part One. The Institutional World of Intellectual Disability......Page 38
1 Twin Brothers: The “Idiot” and the Institution......Page 40
2 Gendered Objects, Gendered Subjects......Page 72
3 Analytic Interlude......Page 104
Part Two. The Philosophical World of Intellectual Disability......Page 122
4 The Face of Authority......Page 124
5 The Face of the Beast......Page 150
6 The Face of Suffering......Page 182
Conclusion: The Face of the Mirror......Page 208
Notes......Page 228
Selected Bibliography......Page 264
Index......Page 278