Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds

Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Excellence in PhilosophyDoes 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 personho