Quote of the Week (and It’s Only Thursday): Hypatia’s Ableist Legacy, co-authored with Nora Berenstain

This week’s quote-of-the-week post (though it’s only Thursday) addresses the historical legacy of ableism at Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. To open our discussion in the post, consider an excerpt from Shelley’s introduction to The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. The introduction, which is entitled “Situating Philosophy of Disability in/out of Philosophy,” offers a summary […]

Special Issue of Análisis Filosófico: “Oppressive Argumentation: Silencing and Oppressive Speech in Argumentation” (deadline: Oct. 31, 2026)

This special issue aims to collect original articles in Spanish and English devoted to the analysis of oppressive discourses within our argumentative practices, with a particular emphasis on those commonly found in Latin American contexts. Informal logic, epistemology, and gender studies will serve as the central—though not exclusive—perspectives guiding this special issue. We may understand […]

How Nathan Cofnas Took a Page from the Republican Playbook and Won

The first rule of the Republican playbook is: when under scrutiny, start a witch hunt to distract from your own crimes. This is precisely what Nathan Cofnas did, and with great success. Whenever someone points out that Cofnas should never have been hired by the University of Ghent on the merits of his “research” on […]

How Much Dark Money Is in Professional Philosophy? 

One of the purposes of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY is to expose eugenic principles and practices within professional philosophy. As Shelley Tremain has argued persistently since founding this blog, the profession is largely animated by the spirit of “neoliberal eugenics,” such that “few philosophy departments (in the Global North at least) remain untouched by the eugenic vision […]

From Bioethics to AI Ethics: A Genealogy of Philosophical Sell-Outs 

The history of professional philosophy is largely a history of, to use a technical term, sell-outs, people who use their mastery of argumentation and rarefied jargon to defend the rich and powerful: colonizers, fascists, and capitalists, amongst other “moral parasites” (as some non-Western philosophers put it). Just as the victors write history, the victors write philosophy […]

Strategic Lawsuits as Epistemic Tyranny

Readers of this blog are no doubt aware of Donald Trump’s penchant for suing his critics and political enemies to silence them. Trump has filed billions of dollars’ worth of frivolous or retaliatory defamation lawsuits against major news outlets, including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, CNN, the BBC, and others. Many of […]

Another Screed against the “Woke Mob” in Academia

Recently, Paul Boghossian and some of his friends at New York University, Princeton, Harvard, and other elite institutions, published a screed against the hostile takeover of academia by the woke mob. The term they used, however, was not the woke mob – Elon Musk’s favourite scapegoat – but rather the “progressive left,” a term they chose because they are […]

Disability Justice Is Animal Liberation: Cripping the Ridglan Farms Open Rescue 

On April 18th, hundreds of activists attempted to rescue beagles from Ridglan Farms, an animal research and breeding facility in Wisconsin. David Killoren wrote about his experience as one of those activists, and defended the use of open rescue to liberate animals[i] from carceral settings. This includes Ridglan Farms, where beagles are confined in 2×4 cages for their […]

Proposal for Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Disability

As I noted in last week’s anniversary installment of Dialogues on Disability, Katie Staal, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Oxford University Press, recently encouraged me to submit a proposal for a handbook on feminist philosophy of disability. I submitted the proposal, about which Katie was very enthusiastic and has sent out for review, earlier today. It […]