Anton Wilhelm Amo
c.1703-1759 · Rationalism · Known
Amo was an Nzema philosopher from the Gold Coast, taken to Germany as a small child, who studied at Halle and Wittenberg and earned a doctorate there in 1734. Against Descartes he argued that the mind cannot sense and cannot suffer. Sensation requires divisibility, being spread out in parts, and only bodies are divisible, so whatever feels sits on the body's side of the line and never the mind's.
Signature
The position Amo is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain
- Perception
- Indirect Realism
Positions on the 7 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (88 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Identity
- leans Unchanging (30 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (75 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- leans Transcendence (75 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (80 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Conviction
- leans Uncertain (30 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
13 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Amo refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Pure Reason / Sense Experience
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Beginning of Things
- Eternal First Cause
What is the origin of reality?