Cleall, E. and Gust, O. (2022) Disability as a problem of humanity in Scottish enlightenment thought. Historical Journal, 65 (2). pp. 328-348. ISSN 0018-246X
Abstract
This article makes a case that disability, particularly visual, hearing, and speech impairments, played a significant role in Scottish Enlightenment thought. Focusing on the work of Dugald Stewart, and in particular on his essay ‘Some account of a boy born blind and deaf’, we argue that disability was a deep preoccupation of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who used it as a test case for various important philosophical questions including those concerning ‘human nature’ and the limits of humanity. The article starts by situating the philosophical debate in the context of lived experiences of, and proximity to, impairment. The second part offers a close reading of Stewart's text ‘Some account’, about James Mitchell, a fourteen-year-old deafblind boy living in the Scottish Highlands. The third part examines how disability operated in relation to other hierarchies of difference that have been demonstrated to have been central to Enlightenment thought, in particular that of race. Overall, the contribution this article makes is to introduce disability as an important, if currently overlooked, category in Scottish Enlightenment thought that needs further investigation.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of History (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Arts and Humanities Research Council AH/P003621/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 17 Mar 2021 07:49 |
Last Modified: | 01 Mar 2022 11:26 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press (CUP) |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S0018246X21000133 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:172183 |
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