Anton Wilhelm Amo

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Anton Wilhelm Amo or Anthony William Amo (c. 1703 – c. 1759) was a

Amo was a

On 29 July 1708, Amo was baptised (and in 1721 confirmed) in the palace's chapel of Salzdahlum near Wolfenbüttel. In 1721 and 1725 he is mentioned as a servant to the Duke's family.

He went on to the

He gained his doctorate in philosophy at Wittenberg in 1734; his thesis (published as On the Absence of Sensation in the Human Mind and its Presence in our Organic and Living Body) argued in favour of a broadly dualist account of the person. Specifically, he argues that it is correct to talk of a mind and a body, but that it is the body rather than the mind that perceives and feels.^[5] One example of an argument that Amo uses to show that it is the body, and not the mind, which senses goes as follows:

Whatever feels, lives; whatever lives, depends on nourishment; whatever lives and depends on nourishment grows; whatever is of this nature is in the end resolved into its basic principles; whatever comes to be resolved into its basic principles is a complex; every complex has its constituent parts; whatever this is true of is a divisible body. If therefore the human mind feels, it follows that it is a divisible body.

(On the Ἀπάθεια (Apatheia) of the Human Mind 2.1)

Because (on Amo's account) the human mind is by definition immaterial and not a divisible body (On the Ἀπάθεια (Apatheia) of the Human Mind 1.3), it therefore cannot be the case that the mind itself senses.

Philosophical career and later life

Amo returned to the

On 10 October 2020, Google celebrated him with a Google Doodle.^[6]

In Stuttgart, an Anton Wilhelm Amo Square in front of the Stuttgart Labour Court was decided in 2022.^[7] At the end of January 2023, the square formerly known as "Lerchenplätzle" in front of the Stuttgart Labour Court in Johannesstraße was renamed "Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Platz".^[7] In August 2020, in a context of "decolonization" of place names perceived to have racist origins, officials in the German capital Berlin proposed renaming Mohrenstraße to "Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße" in his honor.^[8]

In 2024, two museum exhibitions will be held in Germany that focus exclusively on Anton Wilhelm Amo: "Focus on Amo. Pictures for a Scholar" in the Löwengebäude of the University in Halle/Saale ^[9] and the exhibition "Anton Wilhelm Amo - Between the Worlds" at the Museum of Municipal Collections in the Zeughaus in Lutherstadt Wittenberg. ^[10] The curator of this exhibition was the ethnologist Nils Seethaler.^[11]

Works

• Dissertatio inauguralis de iure maurorum in Europa, 1729 (lost). Translated title: Inaugural dissertation on the laws of the Moors in Europe.
• Dissertatio inauguralis philosophica de humanae mentis apatheia, Wittenberg, 1734. Inaugural dissertation on the impassivity of the human mind.
• Disputatio philosophica continens ideam distinctam eorum quae competunt vel menti vel corpori nostro vivo et organico, Wittenberg, 1734 (Ph.D. thesis).^[3] Philosophical discourse presenting ("containing") a distinct idea of what belongs either to the mind or to our living and organic body.
• Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi, 1738. Treatise on the art of philosophising soberly and precisely.

References