Diderot’s Letter on the Blind as Disability Political Theory

Bibliographic Data

ID6352247
AuthorsNancy J Hirschmann (0000-0002-6189-4509, Department of Political Science, The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume48
Issue1
Pages84-108
Publication date2020-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0090591719843063
OpenAlexW2943104892
LanguageEN
Citations received4

This essay considers Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See as a work that can contribute to a disability political theory. By recounting the experiences of visually impaired persons in their own words, Diderot opens up possibilities for a disability politics of self-representation, maintaining that sighted persons should listen to blind persons’ accounts of their own experience rather than relying on their own imaginings and assumptions. By using blind experiences to challenge a philosophical problem that intrigued philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries amid often-unsuccessful efforts to “cure” blindness through cataract surgeries, Diderot develops a powerful critique of the empiricist stress on vision as the primary source of perception and provides a remarkably forward-looking critique of disablist attitudes toward the blind. Through this philosophical discourse, he engages a political argument about the way knowledge is gathered, evaluated, and interpreted through relationships of power

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Blindness · Disability studies · Empiricism · Epistemology · Perception · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Representation (politics · Sociology · French Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub