Because my thinking about social force relations has been formatively influenced by Foucault’s arguments about the constitutive and pervasive character of social power rather than by the juridical understanding of power that most philosophers on the left hold, my thinking about relations of power that circulate in philosophy (as well as throughout the university at large) likewise departs from how most of these other philosophers understand "the politics” of the profession and discipline.
You may recall that juridical understandings of social power generally conceive it as a battle between adversaries. In the terms of juridical conceptions, that is, power is construed as the possession of an authority, group, or institution which is exercised from above as a prohibition or subtraction of the freedoms of others. To make a long story short, on juridical conceptions of power, social change is thus generally understood in organic, evolutionary, and teleological terms rather than conceived as produced through multiple contingencies, the products of multiple conflicts, intentional and nonsubjective, yet unpredictable, without a pre-determined end-point.
Insofar as other philosophers on the left hold a juridical understanding of social power, they therefore generally also hold some organic view about change within the profession. Indeed, many philosophers who assume an organic understanding of how forms of power operate in philosophy seem to justify certain exclusionary institutional, epistemic, pedagogical, and other dimensions of philosophy on this basis. About a year ago, for instance, a prominent philosopher said this to me: “Disability’s time is coming. Right now, we are focused on trans issues.” On the view of this philosophical gatekeeper, the institutional and epistemological roots of philosophy extend according to an organic growth that must not be overburdened with the demands of a multitude of constituencies. Wait your turn. Maybe next year.
David Chalmers recently articulated another rendition of this (gatekeeping) teleological understanding of philosophy when he stated in a comment on the Daily Nous blog that the PhilPapers Foundation will (now) reconsider its assumptions about disability and their effects because critical philosophical work on disability has now garnered enough attention in the profession to warrant such reconsideration. Chalmers’s remarks came in response to a comment that I posted to Daily Nous earlier that day, a comment that comprises a list of my publications from 2013 to June of this year in which I critically interrogate how disability is positioned in the various databases of the PhilPapers Foundation.
I am cautiously pleased that the PhilPapers Foundation (and the feminist philosophers who help to run it) has finally decided to take my criticisms of its databases seriously and to regard philosophy of disability more generally as a serious philosophical endeavour.
I want to point out, however, that when rectification of institutional and epistemological suppression of critical philosophical work on disability is represented in the way in which the PhilPapers Foundation has construed it, indeed, when institutionally and professionally privileged philosophers construe rectification of past epistemic injustices against disabled philosophers of disability and other marginalized philosophers as a form of organic, or natural, progression or concession, the deleterious professional, social, economic, and material effects that this suppression has imposed upon these disabled philosophers of disability and other marginalized philosophers are effectively covered over and will likely remain ignored and unaddressed.
posted by Shelley
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