Aristotle the First Audist

Audism does NOT mean "against hearing and speaking."

Audism means "the superior attiutude of some hearing people towards deaf people, especially those who use sign language". In Latin, audire means "to hearr"

People with the attitude of audism are called audists. Some audistic teachers and parents influence some of oralists negatively about sign language. In turn, oralists become audists's deaf audists -- or in my coin, deaf protégés. Some oralists who lack an independent mind of their own would obey audists unthinkably who falsely talk into making them think that all oralists are intellectually superior to all deaf signers. Once the mindset of the naïve, the gullible, or the myopic is established, it is to change, n'est-ce pas?

In 1000 B.C., history points at Hebrews as having denied the ownership of any property to deaf people. Hebrews degraded and demeaned deaf people. That was an act of audism.

Who made the worse obstruction for deaf people?

Aristotle.

I call Aristotle a myopic philosopher. He was born some 700 years after Hebrews denied deaf people to own a property. Aristotle was infamous for some flaws in his logic. I shall not herein spell out all of his flaws save one. One of the flaws has it that Aristotle declared that people who were born deaf were incapable to reason. That was the act of audism. I must also further that Aristotle had also committed something horrible ever imaginable by telling the Greek government to dump deaf people in the forest to save money.(1) Sound familiar? Yes, you are right that history has repeated ever since then. Because of economic crisis, Hitler did put deaf people to sleep. Were cochlear implant invented in 1930s, deaf people's lives would have been saved? Probably. Again in the early 2000, it was reported in The Washington Post that North Korea's president Kim Jong II dumped deaf people in the forest in the northern forest.

So, Aristotle was historically known as the first audist. Unthinkable or "myopic" people follow him.

600 years later, St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, was influenced by Aristotle and declared that deaf people could not go to heaven because they could not hear the word of God. Philosopher himself, St. Augustine's tract about deaf people's souls being unsaved after death worried many Roman Catholic priests in Western Europe, including Italy, Spain, and France.

The first person to debunk Aristotle's theory was Italy's Renaissance mathematican - physician Giroloma Cardano. He declared that deaf people were CAPABLE to reason. He went on to say that deaf people could be educable and could learn to read and write. His deaf son was his proof! (Cardano has become famous thereafter for that as well as for being a personal friend of the world's most famous painter Leonardo da Vinci who had deaf students as his assistants in painting.

By the late 1700s, sign languages were spreading in Western Europe -- from Spain to France, from Austria to Poland to Russia, and by the 1700s sign language was spread on Martha's Vineyard by Britishg emigrants -- long before Thomas H. Gallaudet met Alice Cogswell in the early 1800s. Now we have 60% of LSF (French) influenced in our ASL by Lauent Clerc who sadly saw the rise of Audism through the followers of AGB.

Bury Audism