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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Asperger’s syndrome

Feminine and masculine, or intimacy and integrity?

24 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by Amod Lele in Metaphilosophy, Politics, Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Asperger's syndrome, Carol Gilligan, Catharine MacKinnon, Edward Said, gender, intimacy/integrity, Japan, Ken Wilber, Simon Baron-Cohen, Thomas P. Kasulis

By his own account, Thomas Kasulis developed the distinction between intimacy and integrity worldviews while trying to understand and express the differences between Japanese and American culture: though each culture contains elements of both, Japan is a culture where intimacy predominates and America one where integrity predominates. But once he’s established this genesis in the introduction, in the rest of the book Kasulis deliberately – and helpfully – makes his analysis more abstract. It’s no longer about Japan and the US, it’s about a pair of ideal types that can be applied to many different kinds of cultural differences, including those within what we think of as a single culture.

One such difference is the presumed difference between men and women. Continue reading →

Asperger’s syndrome in the history of philosophy

12 Sunday Sep 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, Vedānta

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

Aristotle, ascent/descent, Asperger's syndrome, Augustine, autobiography, G.W.F. Hegel, Graham Harman, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, nonhuman animals, Oliver Sacks, Plato, Rāmānuja, Raphael, Śaṅkara, Temple Grandin, Thomas Aquinas

I’ve just been reading the popular neurologist Oliver Sacks‘s piece “An Anthropologist on Mars,” from the book of the same name. It’s a short biography of Temple Grandin, a woman whose life was recently made into a movie. Grandin, an animal researcher, has Asperger’s syndrome or “high-functioning autism”; she understands science, and animals, much better than she understands the social interactions of her fellow human beings.

People describing Grandin often reach first for words like “extraordinary,” “fascinating,” “remarkable.” These are not the words that come to my mind. I say this not because I find her accomplishments limited – they are major – but because I find her story very familiar. I don’t know if I would be diagnosed with Asperger’s myself; but I do know that Asperger’s is part of a spectrum, with full-blown autism on one end. At the other end, I think, one finds the behaviour of typical science-fiction geeks and absent-minded professors, in whose company I unquestionably fall.

The central features of Asperger’s syndrome are a difficulty with social cues and a narrowness of interest; one falls far outside the normal realms of human interest and interaction. (My interests are almost opposite Grandin’s, yet this makes me sympathize with her more. Where Grandin has been obsessed with animals since her youth, my mother recalls that I was the only child to be completely uninterested when a bunny rabbit was brought into our classroom.) The subtle interplay and social niceties that come so naturally to most people, must be learned deliberately and consciously, as one learns mathematics – and learning these is often far more difficult than learning math.

There are a number of philosophical implications that the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome might have. In today’s post, I want to focus on its implications for the history of philosophy. Continue reading →

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