The Faces of Intellectual Disability Philosophical Reflections [Paperback]

In a challenge to current thinking about cognitive impairment, this book explores what it means to treat people with intellectual disabilities in an ethical manner. Reassessing philosophical views of intellectual disability, Licia Carlson shows how we can affirm the dignity and worth of intellectually disabled people first by ending comparisons to nonhuman animals and then by confronting our fears and discomforts. Carlson presents the complex history of ideas about cognitive disability, the treatment of intellectually disabled people, and social and cultural reactions to them. Sensitive and clearly argued, this book offers new insights on recent trends in disability studies and philosophy.

Carlson's book is a significant addition to the welcome burgeoning of philosophical literature about disability generally and intellectual disability specifically.

Licia Carlson has written numerous articles on philosophy and disability and is the co-editor of Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy. She is an assistant professor of philosophy at Providence College.

[P]rovides a rigorous philosophical analysis of how the outsiders viewpoint of ID in particular (generalizable to disability as a whole) will blind, cripple, and even retard (puns intended!) theological work, and that only historical illumination and serious interaction with the perspectives of those with ID or their caretakers can help do justice to the issues at hand.

A Note on Terminology
Introduction: The Philosopher's Nightmare
Part 1. The Institutional World of Intellectual Disability
1. Twin Brothers: The Idiot and the Institution
2. Gendered Objects, Gendered Subjects
3. Analytic Interlude
Part 2. The Philosophical World of Intellectual Disability
4. The Face of Authority
5. The Face of the Beast
6. The Face of Suffering
Conclusion: The Face of the Mirror
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Through her linguistic skill, Carlson renders cl#