  In these disciplines and related ones, consequently, engaging with disability has involved invoking mainstream theoretical presuppositions and principles to explore phenomena associated with certain previously under-theorized or otherwise ignored groups. Not so in philosophy, however, where disability, deformity and illness have appeared to defy application of familiar theoretical presumptions and practices. Examples of the resistance of disability to being subsumed under philosophical theories turn up throughout the discipline's history, from Plato's uncharacteristic emphasis on fleshly ideals in settling the fate of infants with deformities (Garland 1995, 15) to Hume's setting aside the testimony of individuals with illnesses as pertinent to theories of perception (Hume 1757) to Rawls's declaration that justice for disability is a detour that cannot be addressed when basic principles of justice are formulated and therefore must wait for the later, legislative stage. (See Sen 2004 for an analysis of how Rawls's theory fails to respond to the facts of disability, but see also Becker 2005.)