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and other proponents of medically assisted suicide (MAiD) routinely direct at critics of the practice relies on an outdated juridical conception of power that has conditioned Western philosophy and on outmoded ideas about the self-originating character of the neoliberal subject’s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 […]
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.
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 […]
Nathan Moore on the Exclusion of Disabled Philosophers From Philosophy, MAiD, and the Relation Between Them
On Monday of this week, Canadian disabled philosopher Nathan Moore, who was interviewed in the Dialogues on Disability series in October 2020, wrote a thread on Twitter about the exclusion of disabled philosophers from Canadian philosophy, in particular, and the profession of philosophy, in general; MAiD and the culture of eugenics in Canadian philosophy and […]
Bioethics De-Mystified
In “Bioethics as a Technology of Government,” the fifth chapter of my monograph, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, I assert that bioethics emerged as a technology of government to resolve the problem that the production of disability poses for the neoliberal management of societies. In particular, disability is constituted as a problem for a […]
Notes on the Limits of Philosophical Discourse About Abortion
I suppose it was somewhat predictable that various so-called “analytic” philosophers would continue to uncritically accept and promulgate the arguments that liberal feminists (including liberal feminist philosophers) have made about “choice” and “personal autonomy” with respect to abortion. These arguments are very friendly with neoliberal ideas about the mobility of capital which outstrips national borders […]