In recent years, contemporary history of philosophy has broadened its scope in at least two ways. First, previously ignored or under-valued figures are receiving increased attention. This increased in breadth of figures is good, as the Western canon has often been limited in ways that is hard to justify. Second, there is an increase in topics being explored historically. (And sometimes, these two ways of broadening contemporary philosophyâs focus go together, as is the case, I think, with the volume you are holding as a whole.) While this second increase in scope is also good, there are methodological challenges of bringing historical figures from different contexts and with different assumptions into discussion with contemporary treatments. As the present volume indicates, one of the topics of renewed historical treatment is disability. Part of this renewal is an attempt to bring medieval and contemporary figures into discussion. As Richard Cross writes, such attempts are âcomplex and contestedâ:
One reason is that our contemporary notions of disability are themselves complex and contested: there are popular, pre-theoretical notions and highly theorized notions, and, between the two, varieties of practical and political notions âŚ. Another reason is that the very notion of disability is itself modern. So the history of disability involves the isolation and examination of concepts ancestral to our own ones, along with a frank acknowledgement that our own ones are far from clear.1
This chapter acknowledges these difficulties and seeks to further develop a particular sort of challenge: that we canât always simply assume, in the way that some scholars seem to, that medieval concepts map onto the contemporary debates theyâre often taken to connect with. If the concepts donât closely map onto each other, then attempts to foster a cross-historical dialogue can be instances of talking past each other, even if we donât realize it. More specifically, I explore the thought of two medieval theologians and philosophers, Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, with a focus on how they understand the concept of disability.2 I begin with Aquinas, where Iâm interested in whether he would think we have a single univocal concept of disability that applies to all disabilities3 â that is, to all things that contemporary disability studies and philosophical reflection on disability would typically recognize as a disability. In her recent book on physical disabilities, The Minority Body, Elizabeth Barnes argues that we should work from paradigmatic instances of disability toward an account of what disability generally is, rather than privileging an account of what disability is that may not accurately reflect the experiences of those that have the range of disabilities that the account is supposed to include:
A successful account of disability needs to say that paradigm cases of disability are in fact disabilities (and that paradigm cases of non-disability are not) .⌠We want to know what these kinds of things â deafness, blindness, paralysis, achondroplasia, MS, etc. â are, such that they have something in common with each other.4
Her treatment in The Minority Body is limited to only physical disabilities. She is supportive of others who work up from different ground, who want to focus on other disabilities. But she points out that such projects may be aiming at something different than what she is aiming at (namely physical disabilities):
I donât think we should infer that there is a unified category â or a unified connection to wellbeing â covering psychological, physical, and cognitive forms of disability simply because our word âdisabilityâ can refer to physical, cognitive, or psychological disability. Modifiers like âphysicallyâ, âmentallyâ, âpsychologicallyâ, etc. can do a lot of work.5
Barnes isnât committed to the claim that there isnât a unified category of disability. Rather, on her view the mere fact that we use the word âdisabilityâ with this range of modifiers doesnât entail that there is. For Barnes,
the best way to approach the question of whether and to what extent different types of disability form a common kind ⌠is by first engaging in detailed analysis of the different varieties of disability and then exploring the potential commonalities.6
Furthermore, she encourages us to keep in mind that there is great variation within each kind of disability. Not all physical disability has a particular feature in common, and some physical disabilities may be more similar to, say, a psychological disability than it is to other physical disabilities.7
Another debate in contemporary philosophy of disability is about the normative status of disability â that is, whether disability involves, in Barnesâs terminology, âmere-differenceâ or âbad-difference.â8 While Aquinasâs corpus doesnât offer an extended or systematic treatment of the nature of disability, his writings on philosophy of human nature offer important insights regarding his understanding of disability. Through an exploration of Aquinasâs understanding of the nature of concepts, I argue that Aquinas would agree with Barnesâs suggestion above that we should reject the assumption that all disability is of the same kind. That is, Aquinas would reject that there is a species which tracks the range of what we currently call disabilities and that there thus isnât a single univocal concept of disability that captures all and only disabilities. Relatedly, Aquinas thinks that one canât have scientia of things that are only known by the senses or what comes about merely by fortune, as opposed to what is necessary given thingsâ natures.9 Aquinas thinks that âto know scientifically we must know them all at once in the universal.â10 Thus, if there isnât a single univocal concept that captures the nature or essence of what disability is, we wonât be able to have scientific knowledge of disability.
It follows from the discussion of Aquinasâs view that we canât always assume that a particular historical figure has the same concept as contemporary discussions, since it may not be the case that they have a single concept in the first place. But bringing historical figures into dialogue with contemporary discussions is also difficult given that not all figures in a particular discussion have the same concept as others in that same period. So if we want to bring, for example, contemporary philosophical discussions into dialogue with historical figures such as Aquinas and Scotus or if we want to mine the thought of those historical figures to offset lacunae in contemporary discussions, we must pay attention to the differences between how the relevant historical figures understand the concepts in question and how those concepts may not have the same parameters as those that weâre seeking to deploy.
I begin, in the first main section, The Concept of a Concept, by briefly examining how Aquinas understood the nature of concepts and cognition. For Aquinas, the ultimate object of human cognition is grasping the essences (or quiddities) of things. Complete understanding of an object requires the formation of a concept or mental word (verbum). Furthermore, an individual cognizes the more universal prior to the less universal; this means that an individual comes to know the genus first and then the differentia that marks off a particular species within that genus (the characteristic of a thing constituting it in its species).11 In the second section, Thomas Aquinas on Disability, I then turn toward disability. While Aquinasâs corpus doesnât offer an extended or systematic treatment of the nature of disability, his writings on philosophy of human nature do offer important insights regarding his understanding of disability. In the third section, The Differentia of Disability, I argue that Aquinas would deny that there is a single concept of disability that captures all and only disabilities.12 In the fourth section, Further Complexities from Duns Scotus, I look at another medieval figure, Duns Scotus, who has an importantly different account of disability than Aquinas. Given the difference between figures such as Aquinas and Scotus, we canât even assume that two medieval figures have the same concept when contemporary discussion seeks to mine those historical texts for insight into contemporary debates. In the fifth and final section, Plurality in Context, I briefly consider how the multiplicity of concepts of disability gives figures like Aquinas a flexibility that isnât always present in contemporary discussions â a flexibility that can be seen in some of the subsequent chapters to this volume. However, this same flexibility makes bringing medieval figures into discussion with contemporary treatments a trickier issue than is sometimes expected. The chapter thus seeks to show the need for extended and careful treatments of the very sort that this volume as a whole seeks to provide.
