
Episode 97:
Originally recorded: December 9, 2016
Originally broadcast: December 11, 2016
In 2003 there was a fire at a Russian boarding school, 28 deaf children were killed. In a published analysis, two philosophers claimed that it was their deafness that caused their death. They had to be woken up individually and they couldn’t hear instructions to run. The rest was inevitable. Anita Silvers not only takes issue with this interpretation, but describes this analysis as emblematic of everything wrong about our thinking on disability. On this episode of Why? we talk with her about the philosophical errors in our discussions about the disabled and how to learn from these mistakes.
Anita Silvers is professor and chair of the philosophy department at San Francisco State University. She has authored, coauthored, and edited many books and articles. Her professional website is here . She is a nationally recognized advocate for disability rights with a scholarly emphasis on medical ethics, bioethics, social and political philosophy, and feminism.
The text of this episode’s monologue can be found here at our blog, PQED.



The Why? Radio subscription is free. To subscribe, click on the relevant banner, or follow the instructions below.
To subscribe using other platforms, copy and paste the following RSS Feed into your program:
http://news.prairiepublic.org/podcasts/11132/rss.xml
[…] Gilligan, Charles Taylor, Gloria Steinem, Amartya Sen, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Seyla Benhabib, and Anita Silvers, to name a few. I’ve interviewed the great American playwright Tony Kushner in an auditorium of […]
[…] Everyday Life. Philosophy in Public Live, Podcast. Episódio 97, dezembro de 2016. Disponível em: https://philosophyinpubliclife.org/2016/12/11/philosophy-and-disability-with-anita-silvers/#comment-… . Acesso em: […]