Anton Wilhelm Amo's Philosophy of Mind

Abstract

One of Anton Wilhelm Amo's core contributions to philosophy is his study of the human mind. Amo argues that the human mind is a purely active, immaterial substance that always acts spontaneously and cannot itself be acted upon. Amo's account of the mind has far‐reaching consequences for how he views the relation between mind and body, and our cognitive relation to the sensible world around us. This article introduces Amo's strongly representationalist position, and discusses the extent to which he circumvents the problem of epistemic isolation to which his views seem to give rise.

Prejudice as Viciousness: Marie de Gournay and Anton Wilhelm Amo

“…While Menn and Smith note that the legal disputation has not been recovered and may simply have been oral, it is discussed as potentially offering a legal and historical defense of the freedom of Moors due to prior commitments from the Roman Empire (23–25; cf. Meyns 2019a, 1). Treatise , on the other hand, seems best understood as an extension of and expansion on the arguments in Impassivity and Distinct Idea , which are largely focused on “Amo's conception of the mind as purely active and of sensation as purely passive” (Wiredu 2004, 201; Menn and Smith 2020, 30; cf.…”

“…At first glance, it is difficult to see how this could be what Amo meant. As Amo argues at great length, and as subsequent scholars such as Menn and Smith (2020), Chris Meyns (2019a, 2019b), and Julie Walsh (2019) have all discussed, Amo views the mind as purely active and sensation as purely passive; sensation is in the body rather than the mind, and so it must always be absent from cognitive errors such as prejudice (Meyns 2019a, 2019b; Walsh 2019; Menn and Smith 2020). But there is also the interesting case of internal sensations: in Impassivity , Amo writes, “Internal sensations are the passions or affections of the soul, about which see Descartes in his Passions of the Soul ” (Amo 2020a, 175).…”

Mind‐Body Commerce: Occasional Causation and Mental Representation in Anton Wilhelm Amo

“…Both Chris Meyns (2019) and Julie Walsh (2019) offer a negative case against the Leibnizian reading and a positive case for attributing to Amo a theory of occasional causation. Meyns claims that “any direct evidence for attributing a pre‐established harmony theory to Amo is lacking” (2019, 7).…”

“…In place of a Leibnizian theory of pre‐established harmony, both Meyns and Walsh read Amo as adopting a theory of occasional causation 12 . On Meyns' reading, a sensation in the body ‘occasions’ the mind to generate an idea, by being set up as an “archetype”; a thing to be represented (2019, p. 9). This archetype, a bodily sensation, is something the mind “wholly spontaneously [i.e., actively] attends to” before generating an idea.…”

“…The first aim of this paper is to provide an overview of that literature, bringing together several interpretations of Amo's account of the mind‐body relation and providing a comprehensive overview of where the debate stands so far. Doing so reveals that commentary is split between those who take Amo to adopt a Leibnizian account of pre‐established harmony between mind and body (Emma‐Adamah, 2015; Smith, 2015) and those who argue that Amo adopts a theory of occasional causation (Meyns, 2019; Walsh, 2019). Both views deny that the body is the efficient cause of the mind's ideas but while the Leibnizian account holds that ideas exist innately in the mind, the occasional causation account maintains that the body is their occasional cause.…”