I wouldn’t know that there are famous ones that we would know about. I do know that I was diagnosed with autism and the fact that there are jerks out there who think people like me are incapable of creative thinking or deep philosophizing REALLY offends me. I understand ASD has varying degrees but what disturbs me is people generally lump us all into one category and use “Rain Man” as their idea of what all autism is like. It’s weird. I would be having a long conversation with neuro-typicals and they would say something like: “You’re a really neat person and have a really interesting perspective but you seem…different.” In the past, I just volunteered what I had been diagnosed with autism as a child and all of sudden the person would be shocked and say “Wow! I thought you were normal! I would have never guessed…eh, you’re high functioning, right? You know…one of those…Asparger people??” One girl younger than myself suddenly changed her demeanor and shortly cut off our conversation and ignored me, but it may have been because she was out protesting on behalf of using “abortive fetus parts” in stem cell research in Madison and I stopped to ask her what her positions on abortion, infanticide and euthanasia were and I found out she had deep beliefs on “quality of life” and included people with Down’s syndrome, Dementia, Alzheimer’s, Autism and Savants as those greatly lacking quality of life, so I asked her if she would recommended a child “diagnosed” with such–if we could do it so far as I know they can’t yet prenatally diagnose which babies are going to be born with ASD–to be aborted and she said definitely so. Then I asked her if she thought I had anything and she said of course not I seemed perfectly normal, then I told her what my diagnosis and she almost freaked and then said “Well, then you must be very high functioning then!” She was pretty mad and I suppose she should have been because I deliberately trapped her, but that has been my general experience with people who aren’t well informed in the subject of psychology. Others have freaked that I got married and had children and held many jobs, including supervisory and teaching positions. I do have two children, one of whom, very young, is very likely a savant. (He hardly talks but is fantastic at memorizing things if you teach them as songs, has some poetical ability and is very musical. If he functions all right in school we want to put him in a music program because he also has perfect pitch and WANTS to play instruments but right now resists formal instruction. We just let him bang around on his musical toys for now. He sings all the time and can remember musical scores and songs weeks later and what you read yesterday and conversations perfectly well.) A long time ago the much older one was though to be “gifted Aspergar’s” but those that wanted to call her that have finally admitted she’s a gifted neurotypical. But some people are horrified(?) that I have reproduced and wonder what my daughter’s chances are of having a kid like my son. Sometimes this hurts an awful lot. I can understand my son has problems and will have a lot of trouble growing and I can understand people would rather not see him have kids unless he really matures and changes but I sure wish they would leave my daughter alone. She is perfectly normal in every way and the few times I do “goof up” she actually helps me and says I am a great mom. I had the same ability as my son in memorizing and singing (I can cook and bake without consulting most of my recipes since most of them are in my head–sometimes I don’t even bother measuring.) but seem to have “socialized” and can function easily in the real world and most people that pass by every day have no idea about my diagnosis and most of the time I don’t tell people because their behavior towards me suddenly changes and usually not for the better.
I hope I haven’t upset or offended anyone, just stating my life like it is.
Please check out the post I made at the end of this thread and tell me what YOU think.
I am autistic according to diagnosis and yet I CAN think creatively and love reading philosophy and discussing world views with people, if they can take my “autistic” manner of conversation and social interaction.
Of course…I feel MUCH more comfortable writing or taking on the phone or talking in a place with little noise or distractions.
I think you have misunderstood. I do not think anyone wants to suggest that people who are autistic are incapable of understanding or even doing philosophy. I see no reason why an autistic person should not be capable of understanding or doing philosophy as well as a non-autistic person of comparable intelligence. The OP of this thread, however, asked if there were, or could be “autistic savants” of philosophy, in the same sort of way that certain very rare autistic individuals seem to have extraordinary talents, talents that often seem very difficult to explain in terms of their education or experience, in some very circumscribed domain (such as certain aspects of mathematics, or art) whilst being often greatly impaired in their intellectual performance in other areas. That is, could someone have extraordinary philosophical abilities because of their autism (rather than despite it, or incidentally to it).
I think that is very unlikely to be the case. Autistic savant skills, although no-one really understands how they arise, seem to be always be skills in very narrow, circumscribed fields of endeavor, fields that call for great intellectual acuteness but very little breadth of knowledge or understanding, and also fields where there are well defined, generally agreed-upon concepts (such as math) and fairly objective criteria of success: you can check on your computer whether an arithmetical savant has got the right answer, and you can easily see whether an alleged artistic savant’s drawings actually look like things, or are just scrawls. Philosophy (except perhaps for certain technical aspects of logic) is not that sort of subject at all. To be done well, it calls for great breadth of understanding, its very stock in trade is ill defined, unclear and contested concepts (its business is largely that of trying, rarely with more than very partial success, to clarify concepts and to create a greater degree of consensus about them), and criteria of success and failure in philosophy are far from clear and objective, rather, negotiating them is a central part of the philosophical process itself.
For similar reasons, I think, there are not, and are never likely to be any autistic-savant historians or sociologists. None of this means that autistic people cannot understand philosophy, or history, or sociology, or even make contributions to those fields. What it does mean, however, is that they are very unlikely to have special, savant-like talents in those sorts of fields because of their autism. An autistic philosopher or historian is going to have to spend just as much time studying philosophy or history as a neurotypical person would before they will have any hope of being able to make a significant contribution to such fields.* That does not seem to be the case for autistic-savant calculators or artists; they seem to acquire their talents with a minimum of study.
¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬
*Of course, sometimes a lucky discovery can lead to an important contribution to history being made by someone without deep historical knowledge, but an autistic person is no more likely to get lucky in this way than a neurotypical. In philosophy, there is not even a place for serendipitous discovery, however. There is no substitute for deep and broad knowledge.