Samenvatting

From 1478 to 1485 Desiderius Erasmus studied at the Latin school in Deventer. In 1509 he wrote his  amous work In Praise of Folly in London. In this work the goddess Folly decides to write an eulogy about herself, which she defends by saying that this is much better than the aristocrats, who pay someone to praise them. Folly divides the world into fools and wise men.This resembles the distinction in thinking that Nobel Prize winner psychologist Daniël Kahneman makes between system 1 (thinking fast, instinctive and emotional, parallel, natural and fallible: Folly’s masses) and system 2 (slow , serial, logically and less natural in use: Sages). Compared to "normal" people, autistic people work primarily through system 2, which means that their information processing is slow, analytical, systematic and profound.