core classes and disability services

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There might be enough material here for two or three different topics, but here it is. I'm sure you all know that core classes can burn you out, because they don't allow you focus on one special interest. We all have to get through it. I have a philosophy paper due next week, and still have know idea what to write it on. Does anyone have any suggestions for relevant topics? The paper must begin with a real life type situation and a philosophy that can be discussed using the situation as an example. Also, I've mentioned this in a different thread, but I'm not sure if or how I should get DXed. As a blind person, my disability counselor says I should learn to be more social, because most blind people need to be even more social than sighted people. This is so they can hire there own readers and note takers, and so they can network with many people for any other resources they might need. Be more social than the average NT? Don't think so. Should I tell them, or would it make things worse? People seem to think AS is just the new fad anyway. Advice?

Hi, Kate.

I'm currently getting burned out in my upper division courses- even when the class is within your department, you don't always get to focus on your one special interest.


For your paper, do you have to restrict yourself to philosophies you've covered in class? If I was able to pick anything, I'd personally go with determinism (wikipedia link) because it's very easy to argue, or relate to any real life event. Then pick some event, or state of being that you've experienced (it might be easier to draw from your own life) where it is obvious that outside factors were responsible for this to happen to you, and trace back the prior causes to illustrate that this event was predetermined by a series of occurrences outside of your control. I think a paper like that might be fairly straight forward and easy to organize.


As for being diagnosed, I really don't see how it could hurt. If they know you have difficulty with social interaction, the only thing that might happen is they might help make sure you are getting in contact with people that can get you the resources you need. And if they don't offer more assistance in that area, there's always the whole "understanding your diagnosis leads to finding ways to deal with it" thing.

Yes, but if I bring it up in class, that technically means we discussed it in class. So if I want to do a paper on it, all I must do is mention it briefly.

If you feel like knowing if you have asperger's would help you deal with life better, or if it will help you deal with the disability services people, then by all means go see someone about it. Being blind (probably) doesn't have anything to do with having asperger's or not, and it's certainly possible to be both.

You mentioned this in the other thread, but if you need note taking and they're not providing it to you, you need to fix the situation. Most likely you had to provide some kind of documentation to them in order to get disability services, and if it specified braille notes, you should contact the head or supervisor of the disability service people and straighten this out. If the documentation didn't explicitly require notes then they might want you to go back and have it added to the documentation. In any case getting diagnosed with asperger's might help with getting notes, if the psychologist says you need note-taking as well.

As for philosophy, that's a pretty big field, but it sounds a bit like you could do a morals/ethics slant. For example, you may have someone in a dilemma trying to choose between two actions and he isn't which is moral and which is not. He or she might try to resolve the issue by defining what it means to be moral, or what it means to be ethical. The philosophy part begins because then it can remain unclear whether that definition captures precisely what moral or ethical, or whether something that is truly moral is left out of the definition, or if something immoral falls under the definition of moral (the technical name is the "open question problem") - if this class has talked about Greek philosophy at all, you can bring in Socrates very easily - Plato's Euthyphro is in fact very much centered around this problem.

Good luck!

Here's an introduction to the "smartest man in America" 's theory on everything - genre: philosophy.

http://www.ctmu.org/