Anton Wilhelm Amo

Agora

Anton Wilhelm Amo

c. 1703–1759

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

The mind cannot be affected by physical things, so sensation belongs to the body alone – and his lost treatise on the legal status of Africans in Europe reportedly defended their rights.

Placement

African & Africana Philosophy · Africa south of the Sahara · Mind & Consciousness, Epistemology, Politics & Law

Taken from the Gold Coast as a child and given as a “present” to the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel: the first known African-born scholar to earn a doctorate in philosophy at a European university and teach there – in Halle, Wittenberg and Jena.

Key ideas

Impassivity of the mind
Rights of Africans in Europe (1729, lost)
Critique of Cartesian interaction

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Influence

Influenced by 2

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

influenced by disputed
Amo grew up at the Wolfenbüttel court, whose library Leibniz directed until 1716; whether Leibniz shaped his De humanae mentis apatheia (1734) is disputed. A. W. Amo, De humanae mentis apatheia (1734); D. Menn and J. E. H. Smith (eds.), Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body (2020); J. E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference (2015)
Evidence: AI draft
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz › 1646–1716
Christian Wolff

influenced by
Amo taught at Halle, Wittenberg and Jena during the disputes over Christian Wolff’s philosophy, and reference works place the logic and metaphysics of his Treatise on the Art of Philosophising Soberly and Accurately (1738) in the Leibniz–Wolff school; how far he followed Wolff in detail has not been checked here. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Amo, Anton Wilhelm”; A. W. Amo, Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi (Halle, 1738)
Evidence: AI draft
Christian Wolff › 1679–1754

Criticism

Criticizes 1

René Descartes

criticised
Amo turned against Cartesian interaction: the mind, active and immaterial, cannot sense or suffer, so sensation belongs to the living, organic body (De humanae mentis apatheia, 1734). A. W. Amo, Dissertatio inauguralis philosophica de humanae mentis apatheia (Wittenberg, 1734); S. Menn & J. E. H. Smith (eds.), Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body (2020)
Evidence: AI draft
René Descartes › 1596–1650

Works

1734On the Impassivity of the Human Mind
The mind does not sense or suffer; sensation belongs to the living body.

Position

Amo’s Halle disputation of 1729, “On the Rights of Moors in Europe”, is lost and known only from a contemporary report. His Wittenberg dissertation On the Impassivity of the Human Mind takes up the Cartesian mind–body problem: the mind, being active and immaterial, cannot sense or suffer, so sensation must belong to the living, organic body. His Treatise on the Art of Sober and Accurate Philosophizing sets out a logic and theory of knowledge in the rationalist style of his time. The first African known to have taught philosophy at a European university, he was long left out of histories of the German Enlightenment and has been widely studied since the late twentieth century.

Life & context

Anton Wilhelm Amo was born around 1703 near Axim on the Gold Coast, today Ghana, and taken to Europe as a child; in 1707 he was given as a “present” to Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and baptised. He studied at Halle, earned his doctorate at Wittenberg in 1734 and taught in Halle, Wittenberg and Jena. Facing racist hostility, he returned to the Gold Coast around 1747. He is last recorded there in 1753, when the ship’s surgeon David Henri Gallandat visited him; he probably died around 1759.