If Plato was the first Western political philosopher, Aristotle was the first political scientist in today's sense. Plato's Republic, for instance, envisages an unworldly political utopia. But in Politics, Aristotle investigates a comprehensive range of political forms and regimes, down to their unglamorous, operational details. To research the book, Aristotle sent pupils at the Lyceum, his school in Athens, to many Greek city-states to record their constitutions, forming a kind of empirical data set.
What is the relationship between disability and well-being? (In this post, I'll call this the Relationship Question.) The Relationship Question is both enormously complex and highly fraught -philosophically, socially, and politically. Philosophers have starkly different views. One prominent view, held by Elizabeth Barnes, is that disability is a Mere Difference: having a disability does not, on its own, make one's life go worse, although in our ableist society, disabled people are more likely to live worse lives because of barriers and stigmas.