Did Wittgenstein Have Asperger's Syndrome?

[tairanotomomori]

Quite a lot of people have some traits typically associated with AS, but that does not make them autistic. Isn't this exactly the kind of reductionistic explanation Wittgenstein disdained??

[whitetigerdream]

@tairanotomomori the two experts I quoted from saw an entire syndrome in Wittgenstein, meeting all criteria in the DSM, and not just a few "traits". Nearly everyone I know has at least one trait of Asperger's. I wonder what Wittgenstein would have felt about the assessment. It's kind of unfair to diagnose people retroactively, in a way.

[tairanotomomori]

@whitetigerdream He might have been. The point I want to make is more like that's not what made him an original thinker. I have known four or five people whose personality traits were such that I seriously suspected they had AS (AS is not that widely known in Japan) , but they were anything but charismatic intellectuals, rather, unfortunately, the complete and utter opposite. AS comes in so many shapes and forms that to have one word sum up somebody like WS seems to do him an injustice.

[VVillowz]

I wonder how many people who wrote the bible were Autistic.

[VVillowz]

Idiotic psycho-babble. If Wittgenstein was Autistic then so was Kafka, Beethoven, Chopin, Freud, and so on.

[danieljliversLXXXIX]

@VVillowz Kafka certainly was.

[misspinkpunkykat]

What's the name of this music peice?

[S2Cents]

Well good thing Wittgenstein wasn't 'cured' by doctors and made 'normal'.

[tenderUnbutton]

I don't agree. There's a difference between being eccentric and depressed and being a person with Asperger's. One of Wittgenstein's greatest contributions to the philosophy of language was to recognize the social use of language (pragmatics) in his investigations. People with Asperger's have deficits exactly in this area.

[S2Cents]

@tenderUnbutton A philosophical genius with Asperger's cannot recognize and brilliantly elucidate the social usefulness of language as he witnesses it in others? Maybe he'd have the advantage of observing the phenomenon with an 'outsider's' detached perspective.

[MrEmpirical]

"Suffered" from Asperger's Syndrome? That's a pretty negative way of putting it. Aspy people have certain social and behavioral shortcomings but they often have intellectual gifts not possessed by normal people.

[tenderUnbutton]

@MrEmpirical "Aspy"??? talk about a negative label. Dude, it's "people with Asperger's".

[MrEmpirical]

@tenderUnbutton Since when do abbreviations = negative labels? You obviously don't know any Aspy people.

[lungarius]

Plain unWittgensteinian....and stupid

[jlynn2424]

This is a lovely video. What is the music playing in the background?

[EGarrett01]

Of course he did. He was described as having an alien-like personality.