Heidegger=autistic

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How do you define "too much" skepticism? Simply pointing out that "We can never know for certain" should not be considered "too much" skepticism.

Depends on the situation, a general definition would be difficult. It would be something along the lines of being skeptical to the point where you are led to inaction in cases action has a higher expected utility than inaction. In this case speculating can be more entertaining than not speculating. Agreed that we can never know for certain with historical characters.

I always thought Kant was a pretty autistic guy. Like most famous historical figures who weren't monarchs, he was extremely fixated on a subject (philosophy), but he had some slightly more telling traits as well. He was extremely regimented in his routine, to the point that local housewives would set their clock by the time he walked past their windows. Much of his philosophy is based around absolutist thinking (e.g. it's wrong to tell a white lie in order to save a life), which he held himself to. He kept track of intellectual trends, but preferred to forge his own path, not falling neatly into either the empiricist or rationalist traditions. He had no intimate relationships, although he is said to be widely liked and to have several close friends.

I don't really know very much about Heidegger. I have a friend who is a scholar of Heidegger (although he is more interested in Percy Shelley) who says that Heidegger only joined the Nazi Party because of his fixation with nation building. Combined with the other details it does sound like he might have been autistic - but as ever, there wasn't really a conception of autism in his age so contemporaries naturally will not have seen the whole picture the way we can with a person today.

I had to do a little thinking of the reactions above; whether it is ethical or possible in a way to say "he was so-and-so" when you talk about someone from the past
But I still don't like just to talk about a work such as his in an abstract way, as if it is something in-and-for-itself; today I read a book, few pages, titled "a psychological reading of.... [book]" I tried this as sort of an intermediate way, not just branding something as "autistic" (which can say more about me than about Heidegger), but also not just a "distant", "mechanical" reading of his texts:

heideggers-sein-und-zeit-a-psycho-analytical-reading

Its not a crime to speculate that an historical figure had such-such as long as you don't take your armchair posthumous diagnosis too seriously.

Indeed folks do it all the time., Nixon had a paranoid streak. Most dictators were sociopaths. Like autistics, the LBGT community can go hog wild with claiming historic figures as their own. But that doesn't mean that theyre were not a fair number of historic figure that historians ARE rather certain were gay. And so on. There was a fad a couple of years ago of both gays and aspies claiming Lincoln as their own. Both groups, I think that its safe to say, were wrong. However Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan, is accepted by most historians as being in the closet gay (though not aspie).
Two caveats
One: you gotta take the bitter with the sweet. I doubt that Hitler was aspie, but a WP presented some rather good evidence that Hienrich Himmler, head of the SS, probably was aspie. So if Einstein were aspie or if you could prove that Heidegger were aspie then you have to entertain the notion that the head of the SS might have been too.Gotta take the bad with the good.

Two: Just be careful about context. A hundred years from now someone may pore over accounts of the Lyndon Johnson presidency in the Sixties and learn that LBJ once said "I never really trust a man, until I have his pecker in my pocket" and misunderstand it, and think that that was evidence of LBJ being gay!

And...

Gawd only knows WHAT some investigator in future might think about THIS guy!

pretty good, actually.
i end to think of kant or kierkegaard as saktra, sometimes nietzsche, but h. in his use of language does depart from conventional usage to a significant degree, all apart from the radicalness of his ideas.