Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the ninetieth 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 […]
Nursing Home Incarceration and the Fate of One Canadian Philosopher
Throughout the pandemic, I have written a number of posts on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (e.g. here, here here, here, here) and more formal publications about the horrors of nursing homes in Canada and abroad and the ageism and ableism that the institutionalization of elders and disabled people reinforces. In “Philosophy of Disability, Conceptual Engineering, and the […]
What makes something “social”?
We use the term ‘social’ to refer to a wide range of phenomena at different levels of abstraction… and it is very likely that most if not all of the social phenomena we care about as philosophers are complex enough to occur at more than one ontological level.
Friday Musings About the Exclusions of Feminist Philosophers
BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY blogger Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril posted a few Twitter threads a couple of days ago that highlight some of the detrimental statements and assumptions that Elizabeth Barnes makes in The Minority Body, including a thread that draws attention to (as I point out in Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability) the way that Barnes draws […]
What Can Deans Do?
Samantha Brennan is the Dean of the College of Arts at the University of Guelph. Hence, she is one of the most influential and powerful members of that university community. Brennan is also one of the most influential and powerful members of the philosophical community in Canada and, I would argue, the most influential and […]
Eurocentrism, Philosophy, and Academic Excellence, SOAS/Online, Sept. 29, 2022, 4-6 (BST)
Second Lecture in the “Re-reading the Western Canon: New Perspectives on Ignored Problems” on September 29, 2022, 4-6 pm (BST) Amandine Catala (Associate Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair on Epistemic Injustice and Agency Université du Québec à Montréal) will speak about: “Eurocentrism, Philosophy, and Academic Excellence” Register in advance at the link below: […]
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 […]
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 […]