Welcome to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY! BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY aims to provide the philosophical community with a forum for critical analysis of biopolitical asymmetries and other mechanisms and effects of power in philosophy and beyond. The BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY insignia in the banner depicts a dandelion, suggesting life, networks, systems, and change (photo credit: James Niland). BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY will […]
Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Eric Schliesser
Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the eighty-ninth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers […]
Whose Academic Freedom? (Feminist) Bioethics, MAiD, and the Professionalization of Ableist Exceptionism
Since the last months of 2020, I have written numerous posts about MAiD and Bill C-7 at BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY in order to inform its international readership about these events in Canada and to explain the links between the events, the disproportionate influence of bioethics in Canadian philosophy, and the eugenic culture in Canadian philosophy that […]
Feminist Reflections on MAiD and Compassion
The charge of fallacious slippery-slope reasoning that Jocelyn Downie, Udo Schüklenk, and other proponents of medically assisted suicide (MAiD) routinely direct at critics of the practice relies on an outdated juridical conception of power that has conditioned Western philosophy and on outmoded ideas about the self-originating character of the neoliberal subject’s freedom and autonomy that […]
Dialogues on Disability on Wednesday, August 17th, at 8 am EST
I have read almost all of your interviews and they are always wonderful. … I am really looking forward to the next installment of Dialogues on Disability.” — Adrian Piper “I’ve learned so much from Shelley Lynn Tremain’s Dialogues on Disability through the years (and found out about so much exciting work being done by disabled […]
Canadian Philosophers: Your Ableism is Killing Us (CW: Suicide)
If you pay some attention to Canadian philosophy Twitter, you might have gotten the impression over the last week that the most pressing issue for Canadian philosophers was the closure due to the Emancipation Day holiday on Monday of stores that sell high-quality coffee beans. If you scrolled through Twitter a bit longer, however, you […]
Why Do Disability Bioethicists and Feminist Bioethicists Sustain the Status Quo of the Apparatus of Disability?
This past weekend, I wrote a comment on a Twitter thread according to which disability bioethicists extend the biopolitical normalization of the apparatus of disability rather than challenge it, sustaining the status quo. It would have been more astute for me to have written, as I have in a few places (including here), that disability […]
Whataboutisms, Exclusion and Silencing
Behind every whataboutism is a claim of exclusion. As such, they are easy to dismiss as irrelevant and distracting, since they are never already part of what is at issue.
Full List of Participants for Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 3, Online, Dec. 6-9, 2022
The planning for Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 3 is gearing up. I expect to post a preliminary program for the third edition of this pathbreaking online conference in September. Registration will open at that time. In the meantime, however, the full list of participants–presenters and chairs–of this exciting conference has now been finalized and […]
Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Maeve McKeown
Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the eighty-eighth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers […]
Philosophy, Disability, and the Ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic
Despite what governments of the world with their bottom-Iines want us to believe, the pandemic rages on. The WHO reports that COVID-positivity rates have tripled across Europe in the past six weeks. Fifty-three countries in the European-Central Asian region reported nearly 3 million new cases last week, with nearly 3,000 deaths each of the last […]
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