ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two medieval understandings of “disability,” with an eye toward how they might be brought into contemporary discussions. A central concern is that medieval discussions of many issues, including disability, utilize different concepts than contemporary discussion, even though the same name is used for that concept. As a result, we can think we’re talking about the same thing as medieval authors when we’re not. The majority of the chapter seeks to show that some medieval figures don’t share a single unified concept of disability. I do this by first examining how Aquinas understood the nature of concepts and cognition. I then turn toward disability in the second section. While Aquinas’s corpus doesn’t 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. The third section of the chapter argues that Aquinas would reject that there is a single concept of “disability” that captures all and only disabilities. The fourth section looks 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 can’t even assume that two medieval figures have the same concept when contemporary discussion seek to mine those historical texts for insight into contemporary debate. The fifth and final section of the chapter briefly considers how the multiplicity of concepts of disability gives figures like Aquinas a flexibility that isn’t always present in contemporary discussions. However, this same flexibility raises challenges for those that want medieval figures to speak directly into contemporary treatments of the same issues.
