Philosophical Dissertations On

Anton Wilhelm Amo (c.1703-after 1752) was the first African philosopher in the modern period to write in the European philosophical tradition and study and teach in European universities. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, while still a small boy, he was sent from his home in present-day Ghana to Amsterdam. From there he was sent to Germany as a court attendant of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, and was subsequently baptized in 1708. He matriculated at the University of Halle in 1727, where he defended a law thesis. He then studied and taught at the University of Wittenberg, before returning to Halle to teach, and later also teaching in Jena. He returned to West Africa permanently in 1747. Though much attention on and study of Amo has previously focused on his symbolic importance as a historical figure--the first African philosopher in modern Europe--Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith argue for a serious engagement with Amo's work as a philosopher. In an extensive introduction, they contextualize his biography and writing within the surrounding intellectual and historical environment, and discuss and analyze his arguments in conversation with other philosophers of the time. This volume contains his two Wittenberg philosophical dissertations, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind and the Philosophical Disputation containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to our Living and Organic Body, both first published in 1734. The editors present the original Latin texts with side-by-side English translations and detailed explanatory annotations. In centering Amo's philosophical thought and making it accessible to more students and scholars, Menn and Smith establish the originality and significance of Amo's rigorous contributions to the mind-body debate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

"Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703 - after 1752) is the first modern African philosopher to study and teach in a European university and write in the European philosophical tradition. We give an extensive historical and philosophical introduction to Amo's life and work, and provide Latin texts, with facing translations and explanatory notes, of Amo's two philosophical dissertations, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind and the Philosophical Disputation containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to our Living and Organic Body, both published in 1734. The Impassivity is an extended argument that the mind cannot be acted on, that sensation is a being-acted-on by the sensed object, and therefore that sensation does not belong to the mind, and must belong instead to the body The Distinct Idea works out the implications for the mind's actions, and tries to show how the mind understands, wills, and effects things through the body by 'intentions' which direct motions in our body intentionally toward external things. Both dissertations try to show how far each type of human act belongs to the mind, how far to the body, and expose and resolve earlier philosophers' self-contradictions on these questions"--