 Philosophers have always lived among, and often as, people who could not see, walk, or hear; who had limited mobility, comprehension or longevity, or chronic illnesses of various sorts. And philosophers have lived in societies that respond to these and other bodily differences in a wide variety of ways. And yet philosophical interest in these conditions and the social response to them was piecemeal and occasional until the past hundred or so years. Some of these conditions were cited in litanies of life’s hardships or evils; some were the vehicle for inquiries into the relationship between human faculties and human knowledge (see entry on  Molyneux’s problem).  But the treatment of disability as a subject of philosophical interest in its own right is relatively new.