Are Aspies born philosophers?

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I was not sure whether to post this in here or the Philosophy, Politics and Religion section, but I thought this was more relevant...

I have noticed that many online pages and such say that people with Asperger Syndrome usually have a more logical mind (one went so far as to speculate that 99% of the human population breed while the 1% or so of Aspies are designed for advancing society and technology) and there are a lot of logically minded individuals on this site (if perhaps emotionally volatile at times, so am I ). Many philosophers and geniuses I have read about seem to have many Aspergers qualities to them, such as having difficulty socialising or being antisocial, obsessing on specific topics, getting either very emotional or showing no emotion and sometimes having strange quirks. Most of them seem to be philosophers (though I do not bother looking at others, as philosophy is my special interest).

Are people with Asperger Syndrome made of the same stuff as many of history's most successful philosophers?

I have philosophical mind, and from what I've seen, a lot of other Aspies do too.

I would say... yes. There's some benefit to autistic brain wiring when it comes to philosophy. It's not really that we're better at it; it's that we don't have this obstacle that NT philosophers have. A philosopher has to question what he's been taught about life, about himself, about others, about the nature of the mind and of existence; and he has to try to get rid of preconceived ideas. Now, an NT will easily soak up the ideas of the people around him through his culture; he'll take them for granted and may not even know they're there. An autistic person will be learning those things explicitly, thinking about them consciously. Because he's more aware of them, it's easier for the autistic person to set them aside, analyze them, or compare them to things that aren't part of his culture.

Autistics also make good sociologists, animal behaviorists, artists, and scientists in general, for similar reasons.

No one is a born philosopher. Philosophy is learned.

ruveyn

I don't have an opinion either way, but I read this in a book (The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome by Tony Attwood):

Yeah, mostly Schopenhauer.

Even though I don't come close to being one, I'd have to say that the majority are.

I muse about philosophical things. But I didn't like my philosophy class last term.

I don't know, but to use a sample size of 1, I am very philosophical. I love reading philosophy. Even before I discovered philosophy I was philosophizing and not realizing it. After taking discrete math, I tried to apply its techniques to describes existence. I began with the single axiom "true" and went from there. Was able to prove that we must believe that reality exists and we must believe that our senses give us a good approximation of what's real.

I've been a sort of philosopher. I've read a lot of what would be in the philosophy section of a bookstore or library. But i'm only now suspecting that my philosophy is a different philosophy than the rest. Most of what I read now that is "philosophy," that would be written by someone in the philosophy department, for example, makes no sense to me and seems like silly word play.

My interest has now drifted toward the related Cognitive Science.

I suppose I would be called an armchair philosopher. (I sit, therefore I am?)

I have read some formal philosophical material, but not in a long while. It always seemed like it said the same thing in 50 different ways.

We know we know things but we don't know what knowing is and we don't know what can't be known by us but might be knowledge anyway.

Meh.

Who knows?

I have a philosophical mindset; however, I hate philosophy.

Mostly, I've found it's just an excuse for psuedo-intellectuals to talk bollocks. And I've met very few self-indentified "philosophers" who weren't also egotistical snobs.

These discussions seem to hinge on one's ability to memorize a large, silly vocabularly comprised of large, silly words not used by the general population, and then feeling superior to anyone who's not in the "club" of large, silly word-users. When I find someone who's actually interested in talking abstract concepts, I'm pleased, but I get very little pleasure from idea exchanges with "philosophers."

Meh.