On the Impassivity of the Human Mind

Introduction

A Latin dissertation that Amo defended at the University of Wittenberg in 1734 for his doctorate in philosophy; it was printed the same year. The full title states its thesis: the absence of sensation and of the faculty of sensing in the human mind, and their presence in our organic, living body. Amo argues from the concepts of spirit and matter: a mind that is purely active cannot be affected and therefore cannot feel; whatever senses must be a body. In this way he criticises Descartes’s account of the interaction between mind and body. The text is one of the few surviving works by an African philosopher in eighteenth-century Germany.

Connections

Criticizes

• Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes