Philosophical Work

I was fortunate to spend twenty years as a philosophy professor at Notre Dame of Maryland University, serving eight of those years as department chair. Together with my then colleague, Dr. Desiree Melton, I revised the curriculum to include courses on philosophy of sexuality, philosophy of race, philosophy of disability, and philosophy of suicide. We revamped old, staid courses to match the desires and needs of a contemporary world. For example, our bioethics course became “The Ethics of Autism,” and our standard epistemology course became “The Philosophy of Knowledge and Ignorance.” In both cases these were not mere title changes but re-imaginings of the courses in light of what we now understand to be true of human beings.

This is an example of how I revised our curriculum: Courses on

Bioethics have long treated disability as an aberration and a flaw, something to be avoided and something which has the power to lessen the humanity of the person who is disabled. To address such ableism head on, the course now begins with a discussion of autism and other cognitive disabilities and, most importantly, listens to testimony from people living with these. Working from their perspective, and not that of the non-disabled person living in fear of losing some ability, participants examine the ways in which disability is a normal part of the human life course. They also study the reasons why disability is constructed as much by the environment, social and physical, as it is by an individual body. From this starting point we begin to ask the traditional bioethics questions such as, is assisted suicide ever morally permissible? In times of medical scarcity, what are the criteria by which a decision to take, say, a respirator from one patient and give it to another, can be considered morally justified? and so on.

Another example: In the epistemology course, what is often the dominant working assumption in the field (and in everyday life) — that knowledge is something gained by individuals, usually through the rational consideration of all evidence available — is now being challenged. Recent work has confirmed what many in the disability, critical race theory, and feminist communities have long argued, that knowledge is a social, emotional, and psychological undertaking in which anecdotal evidence, lived experience, group identification, and what we wish were true play a significant a role in determining what we accept as true or false.

For more about my own scholarship, read a recent interview with me on Shelley Tremain’s Biopolitical Philosophy blog, in the Dialogues on Disability series, or an older, 2015 interview with me in the same series, originally published on the Dialogues on Disability blog, listen to me discuss my critique of evolutionary psychology on episode 365 of the Science for the People podcast, read my critique of Evolutionary Psychology from the perspective of gender and disability in volume 33, number 4 of Disability Studies Quarterly, read Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach, a 2014 book I co-edited with Namita Goswami and Lisa Yount, or read the abstract for my dissertation “Situating Simone de Beauvoir: A Re-Reading of The Second Sex,” at phil papers