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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. This book provides an extensive historical and philosophical introduction to Amo’s life and work, and provides 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.

This section presents, in Latin and English, the entirety of Anton Wilhelm Amo’s 1734 Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to Our Living and Organic Body. In this work Amo attempts to work out the implications of the impossibility of being-acted-upon 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. Amo tries to show how far each type of human act belongs to the mind, how far to the body; he argues especially against Jean Le Clerc, who had attributed a broad range of acts to the mind.

Leibniz developed a new notion of individuality, according to which individuals are nested one within another, thereby abandoning the Aristotelian formula at the heart of substantialist metaphysics,`one body, one substance'. On this model, the level of individuality is determined by the degree of activity, and partly defined by its relations with other individuals. In this article, we show the importance of this new notion of individuality for some persisting questions in theoretical biology. Many evolutionary theorists presuppose a model of individuality that will eventually reduce to spatiotemporal mechanisms, and some still look for an exclusive level or function to determine a unit of selection. In recent years, a number of alternatives to these exclusive approaches have emereged, and no consensus can be foreseen. It is for this reason that we propose the model of nested individuals. This model supports pluralistic multi-level selection and rejects an exclusive level or function for a unit of selection. Since activity is essential to the unity of an individual, this model focuses on integrating processes of interaction and replication instead of choosing between them. In addition, the model of nested individuals may also be seen as a distinct perspective among the various alternative models for the unit of selection. This model stresses activity and pluralism: it accepts simultaneuous co-existence of individuals at different levels, nested one within the other. Our aim in this article is to show now a chapter of the history of metaphysics may be fruitfully brought to bear on the current debate over the unit of selection in evolutionary biology.

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