Learning from My Daughter The Value and Care of Disabled Minds

Does life have meaning? What is flourishing? How do we attain the good life? Philosophers, and many others of us, have explored these questions for centuries. As Eva Feder Kittay points out, however, there is a flaw in the essential premise of these questions: they seem oblivious to the very nature of the ways in which humans live, omitting a world of co-dependency, and of the fact that we live in and through our bodies, whether they are fully abled or disabled. Our dependent, vulnerable, messy, changeable, and embodied experience colors everything about our lives both on the surface and when it comes to deeper concepts, but we tend to leave aside the body for the mind when it comes to philosophical matters. Disability offers a powerful challenge to long-held philosophical views about the nature of the good life, what provides meaning in our lives, and the centrality of reason, as well as questions of justice, dignity, and personhood. These concepts need not be distant and idealized

Eva Feder Kittay was Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University for over 35 years. She has authored and edited collections as well as numerous articles in the philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and disability studies. Her pioneering work interjecting questions of care and disability (especially cognitive disability) into philosophy and her work in feminist theory have garnered numerous honors and prizes: the 2003 Woman Philosopher of the Year by the Society for Women in Philosophy, the inaugural prize of the Institut de Mensch, Ethik und Wissenschaft, the Lebowitz prize from the American Philosophical Association and Phi Beta Kappa, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Discovery, an NEH Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the parent of a daughter with very significant disabilities.