Edited and translated by Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith
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.
Contents
I. Introduction
1. The Life of Anton Wilhelm Amo
2. The History of Amo Reception
3. The Political and Intellectual Context at Halle and Wittenberg
4. On Dissertations and Disputations, and Amo's Two Dissertations
5. Ancient and Modern Debates on Action and
Passion and on Sensation
6. The Argument of the Impassivity and the Distinct Idea
II. Note on the Text and Translation of Amo's Dissertations
III. Inaugural Dissertation on the Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734) (Latin and English)
IV. Philosophical Disputation Containing a
Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to Our Living and Organic Body (1734) (Latin and English)
V. Bibliography
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Stephen Menn is James McGill Professor of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal and Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He works mainly on ancient Greek and medieval Arabic and Latin philosophy and science, and on the history and philosophy of
mathematics.
Justin E. H. Smith is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Paris. He works mainly on Leibniz, Rationalism, and the history of metaphysics and natural philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Making Sense - Margot Northey
Early Modern Cartesianisms - Tad M. Schmaltz
Occasionalism - Steven Nadler
The Black Prince of Florence - Catherine Fletcher
Africa in Europe - Edited by Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken
