Everyone Here Speaks for Themselves

It seems apropos to introduce a small point of order: New APPS is a group blog, which means that there are many authors here and we all speak for ourselves--and only ourselves. 

A case in point would be my strong disagreement with Jon Cogburn's post below. I find it to trade in a series of unfortunate false dichotomies: 1) between valuing or appreciating ability and seeking to avoid speaking in a way that may be hurtful offensive to people with disabilities, or which marginalizes them; 2) between recognizing that illnesses (mental or physical), injuries, or other afflictions are real sources of suffering and seeking to avoid speaking about people suffering from such conditions in a way that marginalizes, delegitimates, hurts or excludes them; and more generally, 3) between being able to express oneself adequately or take joy in life and seeking to avoid harming others carelessly or thoughtlessly, especially where they may also be subject to various systems of marginalization, delegitimation, or exclusion. 

I also disagree with Jon's suggestion that some of our former bloggers were wrong to push as hard as possible for the development in the profession and among those who engaged with us here of a much greater degree of sensitivity and care with respect to how we speak about folks who have historically been marginalized, delegitimated, and excluded by the profession and by the history of 'Western' philosophy.  

If that push has made some people entering the profession—as well as some of its longstanding members—uncomfortable, too damn bad. I'm quite sure that the discomfort those folks are feeling due to being challenged on some of their unreflected assumptions and casual turns of phrase remains utterly minimal by comparison to the discomfort felt by those who find themselves on the wrong side of the norms of our still tremendously exclusionary profession. The fact that Jon seems to have lost perspective on the larger fact of those systems of exclusion and the need to work to ameliorate them is disappointing, to say the least.