Anton Wilhelm Amo's Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body 0197501621, 9780197501627

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Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body

Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body Edited, translated, and with an Introduction by

ST E P H E N M E N N A N D J U S T I N E .  H .   SM I T H

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Menn, Stephen Philip, 1964– editor, translator. | Smith, Justin E. H., editor, translator. | Amo, Anton Wilhelm, approximately 1700-approximately 1754. Dissertatio inauguralis de humanae mentis apatheia. | Amo, Anton Wilhelm, approximately 1700-approximately 1754. Dissertatio inauguralis de humanae mentis apatheia. English. | Amo, Anton Wilhelm, approximately 1700-approximately 1754. Disputatio philosophica continens ideam distinctam eorum quae competunt vel menti vel corpori nostro vivo et organico. | Amo, Anton Wilhelm, approximately 1700-approximately 1754. Disputatio philosophica continens ideam distinctam eorum quae competunt vel menti vel corpori nostro vivo et organico. English. Title: Anton Wilhelm Amo’s philosophical dissertations on mind and body / edited, translated, and with an introduction by Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019058016 (print) | LCCN 2019058017 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197501627 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197501641 (epub) | ISBN 9780197501658 Subjects: LCSH: Amo, Anton Wilhelm, approximately 1700-approximately 1754. | Philosophy, Ghanaian. Classification: LCC B5619.G43 A4624 2020 (print) | LCC B5619.G43 (ebook) | DDC 199/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058016 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058017 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Contents

I. Introduction 1 . 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Life of Anton Wilhelm Amo The History of Amo Reception The Political and Intellectual Context at Halle and Wittenberg On Dissertations and Disputations, and Amo’s Two Dissertations Ancient and Modern Debates on Action and Passion and on Sensation 6 . The Argument of the Impassivity and the Distinct Idea

1

4 39 51 60 88 101

II. Note on the Text and Translation of Amo’s Dissertations

148

III. Inaugural Dissertation on the Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734) (Latin and English)

153

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)

199

Bibliography Index of Names Index of Places Index of Subjects

227 235 238 239

Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body

I Introduction Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith

1. The Life of Anton Wilhelm Amo—​JEHS 2. The History of Amo Reception—​JEHS 3. The Political and Intellectual Context at Halle and Wittenberg—​JEHS   

4 39 51

4. On Dissertations and Disputations, and Amo’s Two Dissertations—​SPM 5. Ancient and Modern Debates on Action and Passion and on Sensation—​SPM 6. The Argument of the Impassivity and the Distinct Idea—​SPM

60 88 101

Early in the eighteenth century Anton Wilhelm Amo was taken, while still a small boy, from West Africa to Amsterdam.1 From there he was soon sent to Germany to work as a servant in the court of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-​Lüneburg in Wolfenbüttel. He was baptized in 1708, and in 1727 matriculated at the University of Halle. Two years later he defended a law thesis, De jure Maurorum in Europa (On the Right of Moors in Europe), with implications for the freedom or enslaved status of black 1 We would like to thank for their comments, especially on our translations, the participants in two Amo workshops in summer 2016, at the Humboldt-​Universität Berlin (supported by the Research Training Group “Philosophy, Science and the Sciences”) and at McGill University, namely Moritz Bodner, Sonja Brentjes, Victor Emma-​Adamah, Kosta Gligorijevic, Alison Laywine, Brandon Look, Calvin Normore, Robert Roreitner, Paolo Rubini, and Roland Wittwer; Paolo Rubini in particular gave extraordinarily helpful comments on the translations. And we would like to thank, for their comments on much of the material of our introduction, and for discussion on many things related to Amo, the participants in the excellent Amo conference organized by Falk Wunderlich and Dwight Lewis in Halle in October 2018, namely Rana Brentjes, Sonja Brentjes, Corey Dyck, Dag Herbjørnsrud, Paulin Hountondji, Andreij Krause, Dwight Lewis, Jacob Mabe, Paola Rumore, and Falk Wunderlich. We would also like to thank our four readers for Oxford University Press, Danielle Allen, Kwame Anthony Appiah, François Duchesneau, and Alison Simmons; we are particularly grateful to Duchesneau for his helpful suggestions on the translation, many of which we have adopted, and for catching several mistakes and omissions both in our translations and in our Latin transcriptions. Some sections of the Introduction are primarily by JEHS, and others primarily by SPM, as listed in the table of contents, but we have revised and occasionally supplemented each other’s work. Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body. Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197501627.001.0001

2  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Africans under the Roman Law practiced in Germany. This treatise, as far as is known, is no longer extant (and may never have existed in written form at all). One year later Amo would matriculate at the University of Wittenberg, and there, in 1734, published his best-​known work, the inaugural dissertation De humanae mentis ἀπαθεία (On the Impassivity of the Human Mind). In this work, Amo forcefully defends a radically dualist account of the relationship between mind and body. That same year he composed a dissertation for defense by the Wittenberg philosophy student Johannes Theodosius Meiner, entitled Disputatio philosophica continens ideam distinctam eorum quae competunt vel menti vel corpori nostro vivo et organico (A Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those things that Pertain Either to the Mind Or to our Living and Organic Body), and himself presided at the defense. He completed a final treatise in 1738, Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi (Treatise on the Art of Soberly and Accurately Philosophizing), and the following year began teaching at the University of Jena. In 1747 a parodical poem was published by a certain Johann Ernst Philippi about Amo’s life and loves, and the following year, under circumstances that remain unclear, he returned to West Africa. The Swiss traveller Henri-​David Gallandat would report a 1752 meeting with Amo in the town of Axim, in present-​ day Ghana, noting that Amo was respected there as a learned philosopher, astrologer, and soothsayer. Amo’s contributions are mentioned in a few secondary sources already in his lifetime, and Gallandat’s report of his meeting with Amo some decades earlier appears in the journal of a Dutch scientific society in 1782. On the basis of these, the well-​known philosopher and physical anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach devoted a significant portion of a 1787 essay “On Negroes” to Amo’s life and work. In 1808 the French cleric and abolitionist Henri Grégoire wrote elogiously of Amo in his work De la littérature des Nègres (On the Literature of the Negroes). In the twentieth century, in turn, Amo will frequently be referenced by authors working in the African and African American intellectual traditions, not least W. E. B. DuBois and Kwame Nkrumah. The definitive scholarship on Amo’s life and work would come from East Germany later in the century, where in the 1960s and 1970s the scholar Burchard Brentjes, in a series of publications, often in collaboration with Ghanaian scholars and institutions, exhaustively documented the African philosopher’s life and work.

Introduction  3 With some noteworthy exceptions, Amo’s remarkable life has tended to gain far more attention than the content of his work itself.2 Very little is known or understood about what Amo in fact believed, and still less about the intellectual context in which these beliefs took shape. Ironically, those who seek to honor Amo simply by invoking his name end up treating him as a mere curiosity, as if philosophers and historians were still stuck in the moment in which racists such as David Hume issued public challenges to produce a single example of a “Negro of accomplishment,”3 and white anti-​ racists such as Grégoire responded with well-​meaning but still rather uninformative lists of such examples. Far better to leave that historical moment behind, and to pay attention to what Amo in fact has to say, to who he was and to the social world he inhabited. Amo, as we will see, was very much a philosopher of his time and place: a contributor to and mirror of the philosophical debates of early eighteenth-​ century Germany, responding to post-​ Cartesian, and more specifically to post-​Leibnizian, debates about mind and body.4 Like many of his interlocutors, Amo took mind-​body dualism for granted, but asked how, if at all, mind and body can causally interact, and to what extent various kinds of cognition are performed by the mind and the body, or by both cooperating, and if the latter how exactly they cooperate. Of the three standard theories of the mind-​body relationship available in the era—​real interaction, Malebranchean occasionalism, or Leibnizian preestablished harmony—​ Amo chose none. Instead, he aimed to work out a new theory in which the mind acts on the body (though not by directly moving some bodily part like 2 As Hannelore Heckmann comments: “The little attention [Amo] has received in literature shows that he has been treated . . . as a datum to comment on the 18th-​century discussion of the equality of the races, the origin of the human species, and slavery.” See Heckmann, “Anton Wilhelm Amo (ca. 1707–​ca. 1756): On the Reception of a Black Philosopher,” The Lessing Yearbook 22 (1990): 149–​58, 155. 3 Infamously, in 1753 or the year after David Hume made the following addition to his 1748 essay, “Of National Character”: “Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In JAMAICA indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly”: David Hume, “Of National Characters,” in Essays Moral and Political, revised edition, London, 1748; excerpted in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, London: Blackwell, 1997, 30–​33, 33. 4 Here we agree with the fundamental article of Paulin Hountondji, “An African Philosopher in Germany in the Eighteenth Century: Anton-​Wilhelm Amo,” in his African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, second edition, trans. Henri Evans with Jonathan Rée, Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1996 [1976], pp. 111–​30 (originally published as “Un philosophe africain dans l’Allemagne du XVIIIe siècle: Antoine-​Guillaume Amo,” Les Études philosophiques (1970): 25–​46), to which we are deeply indebted, despite our differences of interpretation with Hountondji.

4  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations the Cartesian pineal gland), but not vice versa; and in which cognition and action happen when the mind responds to motions (including “sensations”) in the body and endows them with intentional directedness toward an object or an end. This, in sum, is Amo’s principal contribution to the philosophical debates of his era. Before we look at this contribution in detail, let us survey what we have been able to learn of his life.

1.  The Life of Anton Wilhelm Amo 1.1.  Amo’s Place among Africans in Early Modern Europe As scholars have generally agreed since the work of Norbert Lochner in the 1950s, if Amo had not been transported to Europe with the agreement of his parents, it is unlikely that his family name would have been known upon arrival (“Amo” and its variants are common in the Akan-​speaking world), and just as unlikely that he would have known where to return to, as he eventually does late in life after a long career in Germany.5 (“Amo” is not strictly speaking a family name in the European sense, but rather an nzabelano, a patrilineally transmitted name, of which there are only five in total, that is only evoked by the bearer in a limited number of formal settings.6) Beyond the reasonable presumption that Amo spent his years in Germany with knowledge of his family origins, there is significant uncertainty about the circumstances of Amo’s arrival in Europe. He was sent to the Netherlands in 1707, as some scholars have argued,7 for the purpose of training as a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church. At least one other Ghanaian, Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein (c. 1717–​1747), received such training in the Netherlands a few decades later. Capitein was himself initially taken as a slave, and sold to the Dutch captain Arnold Steenhart in 1725. It was only after Capitein was delivered to a representative of the Dutch West India Company that he eventually found himself transported to The Hague with new evangelical

5 See Norbert Lochner, “Anton Wilhelm Amo: A Ghana Scholar in Eighteenth Century Germany,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 3, no. 3 (1958): 169–​79; originally published as “Anton Wilhelm Amo. Ein Gelehrter aus Ghana im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Übersee-​Rundschau (January 1958): 22–​25. 6 See V. L. Grottanelli, “Personal Names as a Reflection of Social Relations among the Nzema of Ghana,” L’Uomo 1, 2 (1977): 149–​75. 7 See for example William E. Abraham, “Anton Wilhelm Amo,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu, London: Blackwell, 2004, 191–​99.

Introduction  5 purposes projected onto him. As we will discuss further in the present section, moreover, according to Capitein’s own account the very fact of arriving in the Netherlands means that a person no longer has the legal status of a slave even if that is what he was before—​and this, on Capitein’s account, is also true for the greater part of the Holy Roman Empire, where Amo spent most of his life. What then was it to be an African court servant in Europe, if not to be a slave?8 As Anne Kuhlmann writes, “In black German history, the court is significant not only because it was the place where black stereotypes—​which became fertile ground for modern European racism—​were first carved out; it was also a major social environment, in purely numerical terms, for people of African origin, particularly in the central, eastern, and northern regions.”9 Peter Martin for his part has painted a picture of systematic oppression, exploitation, and deprivation of rights, for all Africans in early modern Germany, including African court servants.10 Monika Firla, at the other extreme, makes the audacious claim that until the Berlin congress of 1888, which divided Africa up among European colonial powers, German society largely regarded Africans as equals.11 Firla is undoubtedly correct in noting that the status of an African court servant in eighteenth-​century Germany has little in common with that of the plantation slave in the Americas, though one might protest that this is setting the bar rather low for establishing equality. Firla is also right to observe that the prestige that came with having African servants in courtly culture entailed that the lives of African servants in Germany would play out very differently than those of, say, German peasants of the same era, and in some respects they could be assured a certain degree of material comfort. Firla perhaps conflates, however, German aristocratic fondness for Africans 8 On Africans as servants of early modern German courts, see Anne Kuhlmann, “Ambiguous Duty: Black Servants at German Ancien Régime Courts,” in Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250–​1914, ed. Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann, Oxford: Berghahn, 2013, 57–​ 73; Ute Küppers-​ Braun, “Kammermohren:  Ignatius Fortuna am Essener Hof und andere farbige Hofdiener,” Das Münster am Hellweg: Mitteilungsblatt des Vereins für die Erhaltung des Essener Münsters 54 (2001):  17–​49; Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren:  Afrikaner in Geschichte und Bewusstsein der Deutschen, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001; Wolfram Schäfer, “Von ‘Kammermohren’, ‘Mohren’-​Tambouren und ‘Ost-​Indianern’,” Hessische Blätter für Volks—​und Kulturforschung 23 (1988): 35–​79. 9 Kuhlmann, “Ambiguous Duty,” pp. 57f. 10 Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren. 11 Monika Firla, “‘Hof-​’ und andere ‘Mohren’ als früheste Schicht des Eintreffens von Afrikanern in Deutschland,” in Neue Heimat Deutschland. Aspekte der Zuwanderung, Akkulturation und emotionalen Bindung, ed. Hartmut Heller, Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlangen-​Nürnberg, 2002, 157–​76.

6  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations as conveyers of prestige, as it were their philo-​Africanism, with belief in the full political and moral equality of Africans. Rhetorical overtures to African equality often contrasted the imagined negativity of the visible physical features of an African with the positive essence that these features conceal. A vivid example of such rhetoric is given by a 1681 ballet libretto uncovered and studied by Monika Firla, entitled Ballet Atlas Oder Die vier Theil der Welt (Atlas Ballet, or, The Four Parts of the World). “How brown and black we are in color and in lineage,” the Moorish characters in the ballet sing, “Yet we are white as snow in heart and in spirit/​It is not always a matter of outer appearance/​Mussels too contain white pearls within them.”12 Such ballets were not ballets in today’s sense—​obviously today a ballet has no libretto—​but were rather something more like a masked performance at court, with the courtiers and often even the rulers playing a role. Such performances often featured allegorical representations, and frequent among these was the representation of the “four parts” or continents of the world, Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and again and again the same stereotyped figures appear in connection with their respective continents. Thus in the Cartel zu dem Ballett des Atlas von den vier Theilen der Welt (Card for the Atlas Ballet on the Four Parts of the World), recording a performance at Dresden in 1668, we read of Africans that “Their face is quite burnt by the sun/​Yet the heart is white.”13 Duke Anton Ulrich himself, who would much later welcome Amo into the court at Wolfenbüttel, wrote in 1659 a libretto (for a work that he refers to as belonging to the genre of “sing comedia,” thus a sort of musical comedy14) that recycled this familiar theme, but with a more devoted focus upon Africa and African history in classical antiquity. His Andromeda, ein königliches Fräulein aus Äthiopien, des Cepheus und der Cassiope Tochter (Andromeda, a Royal Girl from Ethiopia, Daughter of Cepheus and Cassiope) reveals a long-​standing fascination with Ethiopia, which he will develop further in his multi-​volume, multi-​year novel, The Roman Octavia, which we will discuss in the next subsection. For now it is only important to point out that, as in 12 Ballet Atlas Oder Die vier Theil der Welt, 1681; cited in Monika Firla, “Das ‘Ballet Atlas Oder Die vier Theil der Welt’ (Durlach 1681). Ein seltenes Libretto in der Württembergischen Landesbibliothek Stuttgart,” Musik in Baden-​Württemberg 4 (1997): 133–​48, 144. “Wie braun und schwartz wir sind an Farb und an Geblüth/​So sind wir doch Schnee=weiss an Hertz und an Gemüht/​Es liegt nicht jederzeit an euserlichem Schein/​Die Muscheln schliessen auch die weissen Perlen ein.” 13 Cartel zu dem Ballet des Atlas von den vier Theilen der Welt, Dresden: Melchior Bergens, 1669. 14 Cited in Pierre Béhar, “Anton Ulrichs ‘Andromeda’ als Verwandlung von Corneilles ‘Andromède’,” in Chloe: Beihefte zum Daphnis, vol. 4: “Monarchus Poeta”: Zum Leben und Werk Anton Ulrichs von Braunschweig-​Lüneberg, ed. Jean-​Marie Valentin, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983, 173–​90, 173.

Introduction  7 the other allegorical librettos, the Duke of Wolfenbüttel too tends to contrast African spiritual purity with bodily corruption. Blackness is conceptualized in all of these sources as a sort of disability or birth defect, contrasted with moral uprightness. This cannot of course be the basis for any real social equality, however exalted the praise. Still, examples such as Anton Ulrich’s reveal a world of values that is hard to square with the picture of all-​pervasive racism painted by Martin and other scholars. Amo, stereotyped and limited in his motions by the contingencies of his birth, found himself nonetheless in a social position within which he had some room to maneuver. The prestige of African servants, and the rhetorical emphasis among their aristocratic employers upon their internal moral qualities, meant that for at least some Africans in Europe there was the possibility of significant social advancement—​again, within significant limitations. In this respect, while Amo was an exceptional individual, his own life path also fits a pattern, one followed in different ways by other distinguished Africans in early modern Europe: not least Angelo Soliman (c. 1721–​1796), the prominent Viennese Freemason, born Mmadi Make in the region of what is now northeastern Nigeria or northern Cameroon; and Avram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–​1781), the godson of Peter the Great and prominent Russian military engineer, originally brought as a gift for the tsar at a slave market in Constantinople. It is certain that within the legal context of early modern Germany, there was no official category of slave to which Amo could have belonged, and therefore no possibility of manumission. Undoubtedly, African slaves were brought to Europe and exploited there, but this exploitation occurred outside of a legal framework facilitating and permitting it. Amo had no rights, in the sense of the inalienable rights of a citizen, but in this respect he was in a position comparable to that of the subjects of sovereigns in the non-​republican states of antiquity, and powerful early modern slaves or former slaves such as the janissaries of Turkey or the Mamluks of Egypt whose fates were entirely subordinated to the whim of the sovereign: who were slaves of the sultan in this sense, but who also rose to high ranks, were often revered and honored, and who had considerable freedom to assert their wills in order to shape their own destinies. A court servant, whether African, Asian, or European by birth, moreover, could rise to a considerable position of power, something comparable to a consigliere in the sense deployed in the mafia: technically just a servant, but de facto a councillor or an aide-​de-​camp, with a high level of literacy and numeracy as an absolute prerequisite for the vocation.

8  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations There does not seem to have been any obstacle, at least not as a general rule as we look at the various early modern German courts, preventing a Kammermohr from becoming a trusted administrator or advisor. Arguably, the condition of servitude for Africans within the political formations of the Holy Roman Empire continued to share more in ancient Roman and in contemporary Slavic and Ottoman institutions of servitude than in the total domination and dehumanization characteristic of trans-​ Atlantic chattel slavery. The figure of the “exotic” yet elite servant survived longer in the Russian empire than in Germany:  so long in fact that an African American, Nero Prince (1799–​c. 1856), decided to go and serve in the court of Tsar Alexander I in 1824, evidently in view of the money-​earning potential this post held. As his wife Nancy Gardner Prince would later write in her memoir of her decision to escape the Russian cold in going back to the United States from St. Petersburg:  “Mr. Prince thought it best for me to return to my native country, while he remained two years longer to accumulate a little property.”15 Mrs. Prince, widowed after her husband died of illness, would spend the rest of her life as an abolitionist and activist in the United States and Jamaica, and in her late-​life memoir she would continue to maintain that in the experience of her and her husband in Russia, “there was no prejudice against color; there were there all casts, and the people of all nations, each in their place.”16 This is only one person’s experience, and it is in a royal court rather far in time and place from that of Wolfenbüttel a century earlier, yet it helps us to discern a broad picture of the particular social and economic dimensions of the life of a Central or Eastern European court “Moor.” A typical document establishing the entry of a new servant into a German court would specify both limited constraints on movement (Prince, though her husband was legally free, writes of his employment as well that “[i]‌t is difficult for any one in the Emperor’s employment to leave when they please”17), as well as the duties of the royal or ducal family toward the servant, not least as concerns remuneration. Thus in 1694 Ludwig Rudolph, the son of Anton Ulrich, employed a certain Antoine Emet, origins unknown, as the valet de chambre for his wife. The document establishing this states that Emet must “be faithful and obedient, prompt and ready to expedite with all possible 15 Nancy Gardner Prince, Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, Written by Herself, second edition, Boston, 1853, 40. 16 Ibid., 23. 17 Ibid., 40.

Introduction  9 diligence all orders and commissions that he will receive.”18 We learn as well that “he must show up for service every day, . . . and not undertake any voyages without my permission, as also to try to avoid all quarrels, hostilities, and entanglements in our court.”19 It is stated that for his service he will receive 60 ecus for a year, plus lodging, and that “if he does his duty as he should, we will not hesitate to recognize him for this.”20 A similar document has been preserved, from 1714, for the employment of Rudolph August Malabar, a “Moor” originating from South India,21 who in 1712 had also become the first non-​European servant in early modern Germany to marry a German woman, the daughter of a Braunschweig shoemaker.22 In his 1741 treatise, Dissertatio politico-​theologica de servitute, libertati christianae non contraria (Politico-​Theological Dissertation on Slavery, Not Contrary to Christian Freedom), Jacobus Capitein, while avoiding straightforward autobiography, nonetheless makes it clear that simply in virtue of his arrival in the Netherlands from Africa, rather than in a colony of the Netherlands in the Americas, he is ipso facto not a slave. Thus he notes that “slavery is unknown in the Netherlands, as it is not permitted here to cast anyone into servitude, and in fact on the contrary any slave who arrives here from elsewhere and thereafter resides among the Dutch, and, much more, who duly embraces the Christian religion, as if by silent agreement is granted his bodily freedom, so that he can no longer be sold or transferred in accordance with the will of his master.”23 Here Capitein is largely paraphrasing 18 NSW (Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv in Wolfenbüttel) 112 Alt Nr. 1527. “Nous par la grace de Dieu Louis Roudolfe, Duc de Brunsvig et Lunebourg, confessons par ses presentes, que nous avons pris au nom de Madame la Princesse Christine Louise, Duchesse de Brunsvig et Lunebourg, nôtre tres-​chere Epouse, le nommé Antoine Emet dans ses services pour Valet de chambre, avec condition, qu’il soit fidel et obeissant, prompt et prêt, d’expedier avec toute la diligence possible tous les ordres et commissions, qu’il recevra, et de se garder, de faire aucun desordre et dommagement. Il doit aussi se trouver tous les jours au service avec tous respects, et de n’entreprendre aucun voyage sans nos permissions, comme aussi de tâcher de fuir toutes les querelees, inimitiés et brouilleries dans nôtre cour, mais d’agir toujours en honnête homme et en serviteur fidel. En egard de cela Nous luy promettons pour gages par ann (+ commencant à la St. Michael prochaine) la somme de 60 escus, avec un libre logement, et quand il travaillera pour Madame, on luy fournira tout ce qu’il aura de besoin. Enfin, si Nous verrons, qu’il fera son devoir, comme il faut, nous ne manquerons pas de le reconnoître. Et pour assurance de cela, Nous avons fait mettre dessus Nôtre cachet Ducale, et Nous Nous avons subsigné Nous même. Donne le 28 du Aoust 1694.” 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 NSW 112 Alt, Nr. 1527. 22 Helmut Glück, Deutsch als Fremdsprache in Europa vom Mittelalter bis zur Barockzeit, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002, 146. 23 Jacobus Elisa Joannes Capitein, Dissertatio politico-​theologica de servitute, libertati christianae non contraria, Lugduni Batavorum [Leiden]:  Apud Samuelem Luchtmans & Filium, 23f; Dutch translation, Staatkundig-​godgeleerd onderzoekschrift over De Slaverny, als niet strydig tegen de Christelyke Vryheid, tr. Hieronymus de Wilhem, Leyden: Philippus Bonk, 1742. There is an English

10  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations a 1688 work of the Dutch legal scholar Paulus Voet, who writes in his Commentary on the Four Books of the Imperial Institutions that the “United Netherlands, after they obtained their freedom by right and by arms, have such a strong abhorrence to the law of slavery, that if slaves should arrive among us from elsewhere, or should cross the boundaries of our territory, by this very fact they obtain their freedom. So that many have settled in the United Netherlands, who were accepted into our dominion and likewise into safety and protection, nor are they returned to those from whom they escaped.”24 Voet goes on to acknowledge that there is some residual slavery in parts of Europe, surviving from the feudal era, but that it is largely disappearing: “[V]‌estiges remained,” Voet writes, “of a certain original slavery in Germany, Poland, Muscovy, Transylvania, Prussia, as well as in the regions of Zutphen and Veluwe.”25 And shortly thereafter: “In the kingdom of England, with hard slavery having been eliminated, some are still compelled to work in the mines, others work like slaves for a certain time according to an agreement, who are called ‘apprentices’.”26 This broader context is important not least because it helps us to make plausible conjectures about the motivation and content of Amo’s first work, presumed lost, the legal dissertation On the Right of Moors in Europe, defended in November 1729. According to a contemporaneous summary of the work by Johann Peter von Ludewig (who would be one of the dedicatees of Amo’s Tractatus nine years later),27 Amo “showed from laws and histories that the kings of the Moors were enfeoffed under the Roman Emperor, and that each of them had to obtain a royal patent from him, which Justinian also issued”:28 Amo’s and von Ludewig’s evidence for this (and ours) comes from Procopius’s account of Justinian’s reconquest of North Africa in the translation with a study of Capitein and his context, The Agony of Asar: A Thesis on Slavery by the Former Slave, Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, 1717–​1747, by Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, translated with comments by Grant Parker, Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2001. 24 Paulus Voet, In quatuor libros institutionum imperialium commentarius ubi Juris Civilis tum Antiqui, tum Novi cum Divino, Forensi, Canonico & Feudali in multis collatio institutur, Utrecht, 1668, Book 1, title 3, Number 4; cited in Capitein, De servitute, libertati christianae non contraria, 41. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 We are following Brentjes in this attribution. See Burchard Brentjes, Antonius Guilielmus Amo Afer aus Axim in Ghana. Student, Doktor der Philosophie, Magister legens an den Universitäten Halle, Wittenberg, Jena, 1727–​1747. Dokumente/​Autographe/​Belege (hereafter DAB), Halle: Martin-​Luther-​ Universität Halle-​Wittenberg, 1968, 5–​6. 28 Johann Peter von Ludewig, in Wöchentliche Hallischen Frage- ​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten, November 28, 1729.

Introduction  11 Vandalic War of 533–​534. We know that von Ludewig himself, as well as Simon Peter Gasser,29 had both lectured on Justinian in the law faculty at Halle earlier in 1729, and that von Ludewig had that year sent to press a book on the life of Justinian, and Justinian’s wife Theodora and his legal adviser Tribonian, defending them against calumnies and above all defending the status of Justinian’s Corpus juris civilis.30 The Wöchentiche Hallische Frage-​ und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten of September 26, 1729, indicates that “in the Law Faculty, Herr Chancellor von Ludewig explains the Institutiones juris [of Justinian]  .  .  .  , and intends first to discuss the foundations of Roman laws, and then to derive German laws from authoritative documents and sources.”31 It is plausible to suppose that Amo was present at these lectures, just two months before his own defense, and that Amo’s concern to derive the current legal situation from ancient Roman sources was at least in part influenced by what he had learned in the lecture hall from von Ludewig. Von Ludewig’s summary of Amo’s legal disputation seems to imply that, to the extent that ancient Roman law continues to be a source of law in the Holy Roman Empire, Justinian’s establishment of feudal law in Africa has some bearing for understanding the legal status of at least some Africans in modern Germany. It does not seem to matter for this argument that the reconquest of “Africa” in 533 only managed to gain control of the northernmost coastline of the continent, and even here there were almost immediately Berber insurrections sufficiently destabilizing to render Roman governance a mere theoretical construct. How, then, this construct was supposed to have extended across the Sahara to the Guinea coast of the 29 Wöchentliche Hallische Frage- ​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten, No. 9, September 26, 1729, 133. 30 Announced at Wöchentliche Hallische Frage- ​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten, No. 1, August 1, 1729, 5. Although von Ludewig there says that the book will appear by September, the earliest edition we have found is from 1731, Vita Iustiniani atque Theodorae Augustorum nec non Triboniani. Iurisprudentiae iustinianae proscenium, Halae Salicae:  Impensis Orphanotrophei. See particularly p. 377 n387 for von Ludewig’s account of the status of the Moors in the wake of the Vandalic War. Amo’s citation of “histories,” specifically Procopius’s history of the Vandalic War (= Procopius Wars III-​IV), follows von Ludewig’s pp. 373–​74 n384: see note 66. While von Ludewig discusses Justinian’s wars and also his church policies (defending him against Procopius’s charge in the Secret History that he and his wife Theodora inflamed the conflict between Orthodox and Monophysites by supporting opposite sides), naturally as a law professor he is interested above all in the Corpus juris civilis. Tribonian was often accused of having falsified or interpolated the earlier Roman legal texts that were incorporated into the Corpus, so in defending Tribonian, von Ludewig is also defending the Corpus as a statement of Roman law. 31 Wöchentliche Hallische Frage- u ​ nd Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten, September 26, 1729. The German text is difficult to render in precise English: “In der Juristen Facultät. I. Der Herr Canzler von Ludewig erkläret a) die Institutiones iuris von 9. 10. und gehet sein Absehen dahin; dass erstlich die Römische Gesetze aus dem Grund erörtert; so dann die Teutsche Rechte aus tüchtigen Urkunden und dem Herkommen beygebracht.”

12  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Atlantic, and to remain binding there over more than a millennium, is not clear. Nonetheless, the summary suggests that Amo is not simply giving a blanket argument against slavery; perhaps he is seeking to show that the laws that might bind some African to a particular lord are the same as those governing the obligations of serfs under feudal law, historically throughout Europe, and in some parts of Europe into Amo’s own day, under the protection of Roman law and ultimately of the emperor as the guardian of law. But we do not know what he said. In Slavery, Not Contrary to Christian Freedom, Capitein cites the Halle philosopher and legal scholar Christian Thomasius’s work on medieval German feudal law, as well as other contemporary Halle scholars working on the topic. Capitein never once mentions Africa or the trans-​Atlantic slave trade in his work. Some scholars have contrasted Amo and Capitein on the question of slavery, portraying the former as an “anti-​slavery” thinker and the latter as a “pro-​slavery” thinker. But this is misguided for at least two reasons. One is that understood correctly Capitein is arguing neither for nor against slavery; he is, rather, arguing conditionally that, given the existence of slavery, there is no good argument for withholding baptism from slaves. Second, given the brief description by von Ludewig of Amo’s work, and given the abundance of Halle-​based sources for Capitein’s work,32 it seems reasonable to suppose that both of them were in fact drawing their arguments from the same broad intellectual context, offering largely the same range of argumentative strategies. This context and these offerings were primarily oriented by a conception of slavery that did not distinguish it from the forms of servitude familiar from antiquity and surviving still in parts of Europe—​the terms consistently used by Capitein are servitus, which may be translated either as “slavery” or as “servitude”; and servus, either “slave” or “servant.” To the extent that they were concerned with 32 Among Halle authors writing on topics related to slavery, Capitein cites, for example, Johann Peter von Ludewig, De jure clientelari Germanorum in feudis et coloniis, Halle: Orphanotrophei, 1717; Balthasar Otto Flesche, Dissertatio inauguralis iuridica de singulari commodo servitutis pepetuariae prae temporaria in republica quam indultu facultatis iuridicae in Regia Fridericiana, praeside Dn. Iusto Henning. Böhmero  .  .  .  privilegiis doctoralibus rite capessendis D.  XXVI. Aug. MDCCXXX. H.  L. Q.  C. Solenni eruditorum examini offert Autor Balthasar Otto Flesche stargardiensis, Halae Magdeburgicae:  Typis. Iohannis Grunerti, 1730; Christian Thomasius, An Mancipia Turcica per Baptismum manumittantur. Publice ventilabunt die XIX. Octobris M DC CVIII, horis antemer. a X, ad XII. & pomeridiana a III. ad V. Christianus Thomasius JCtus & Prof. Publ. & Respondens Henningius Adolphus Koch Hoyensis, in Christiani Thomasii, Philosophi & Jurisconsulti, Quaestionum Promiscuarum, Historico-​Philosophico-​Juridicarum, in Academia Fridericiana Anno M DC XC II, Halae Magdeburgicae: Litteris Salfeldianis, 1693.

Introduction  13 African slavery, they were interested in understanding how the laws governing the slave status of some Africans (but not, evidently, themselves) developed out of precedents established in the ancient Mediterranean world and, subsequently, in medieval Northern Europe. There may also be considerable self-​censorship in both cases. It seems implausible that Capitein in particular, in his extant treatise, did not have his fellow Africans in mind when he wrote about the historical institutions of slavery in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Whether he was simply following scholarly norms and precedents by sticking to the examples of slavery also invoked by Thomasius and others, or whether he was consciously avoiding mention of anything that might come across to readers and peers as too personal, is a question that is difficult to answer. What little we know about Amo’s own legal work informs us, in any case, that before he had turned to the study of metaphysical questions, he was actively interested in theorizing about the plight of members of a group to which he belonged in the society in which he had been raised up. He seems to have been interested in the theoretical problem of freedom and slavery, but also in contributing to a problem that bore directly on his own life and that for better or worse contributed to the constitution of his identity. On the other hand, it may well be that Amo did not see this work as pertaining to his own plight in any significant sense, even though von Ludewig does emphasize in his summary that it was “appropriate” to Amo’s situation. Amo himself may not have thought of his own status, either earlier in life or at the time of his studies in Halle, as being relevantly close to that of a slave in the sense of interest to him in the treatise, though he did certainly conceive himself as a Maurus of the sort identified in the title of his 1729 work, and the issue of the “right of Moors” well have had implications not restricted to the question of slave status. As Monika Firla points out, in Germany the only people with the official status of “slave” were the slaves of visiting foreigners, from empires or colonies in which such a social position was legally and officially recognized.33 Such people may have been the subject of this work:  true foreigners, unlike Amo himself—​at least as he may have seen things—​who was a loyal subject of the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg and Prince of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. 33 Monika Firla, “Anton Wilhelm Amo (Nzema, heute Republik Ghana). Kammermohr—​ Privatdozent für Philosophie—​Wahrsager,” Tribus 51 (2002): 56–​79, 56.

14  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations

1.2.  Amo’s Life and Work But let us attempt to trace out, in whatever detail is possible on the basis of the documentary evidence, the important moments in Amo’s life. If Amo was on one of the several ships of the Dutch West India Company to have left the coast of West Central Africa between 1703 and 1706, he would likely have traveled either to the Dutch Caribbean or to the Dutch Guianas prior to making the return trans-​Atlantic voyage to the Netherlands.34 This route was determined both by the financial interests of the Dutch West India Company, as well as by the winds and ocean currents. We know from Henri-​David Gallandat’s 1782 report, to be discussed later in Section 2, that Amo had a brother who had been sent as a slave to Suriname, evidently after Amo himself had already arrived in Germany. There is also a curious reference to Amo in a 1739 report from Hamburg as “a native-​born American,” which might bespeak a general perception of him as having come from the New World, but which is more likely a simple factual mistake, or even a typographical error, letting “American” slip in where “African” was intended.35 Nothing is known with certainty prior to Amo’s arrival in Wolfenbüttel. We know from a document in the archive of the Dutch West India Company of December 20, 1746, which we will discuss in detail later in the introduction, that Amo arrived in the Netherlands in 1707, as a small boy.36 Amo’s year of birth is commonly given as somewhere between 1700 and 1703, and this indeed seems like a fair estimate. The document tells us that Amo was brought to Europe by “a certain Bodel, who at that time was a sergeant in the service of this Company on [the coast of] Africa.” Other more or less contemporaneous sources lead us to conjecture with high probability that the man in question is Christian Bodel, born in the Saxon city of Rochlitz in 1671, and deceased in the same city in January 1708, thus not at all long after delivering the young Amo to Duke Anton Ulrich in Wolfenbüttel. In between, he was at some point active at Fort St. George in Elmina. A German source on the history of Rochlitz from 1715 identifies Bodel as the “governor” of St. George, but it is much more likely that he was a somewhat less high-​ranking figure.37 This source tells us that during his life, presumably prior to his sojourn in 34 See “The Trans-​Atlantic Slave Trade Database,” http://​www.slavevoyages.org. 35 Hamburgische Berichte von den neuesten gelehrten Sachen, 1739, 781; DAB 282. “der Hr. W. Amo, ein gebohrner Americaner.” 36 Het Nationaal Archief, archive inventory 1.05.01.02, document 401. 37 Historische Beschreibung der alten Stadt und Graffschafft in Meissen, Leipzig: Johann Christian Martini, 1719, 55.

Introduction  15 Africa, Bodel had been in the service of the courts at Berlin, Kurland, and Braunschweig. This makes it highly likely that he brought Amo directly to Wolfenbüttel, to the duke, as a result of some prior arrangement with him, and that it had not originally been intended, as has sometimes been supposed, that Amo remain in Holland, either as a servant or as a student of theology, only to be sent to Germany later, once, for whatever reason, this original plan fell through. The first clear mention of Amo’s existence is the entry, already mentioned, in the register of the Salzthal Chapel, indicating that he was baptised on July 29, 1708.38 Perhaps as early as 1717, and certainly as early as 1721, we have receipts indicating the amount of money disbursed to Amo for his work the previous year.39 On December 19, 1719, we have the first document written by Amo’s own hand:  a signed and dated receipt for quarterly Kostgeld or living expenses he has received, in the amount of 16 Reichstaler.40 On April 23, 1720, we have a second, nearly identical receipt, for the same amount.41 As Firla notes, the fact that Amo received Kostgeld compels us to infer that he did not eat and sleep at the court itself, but likely lived with a sort of foster family somewhere in the town of Wolfenbüttel.42 The Braunschweig historian Ingeborg Kittel further complicates our effort to learn from documentary evidence about the early life of Amo, noting that the African Hofdiener Rudolph August Mohr, who had been employed at Wolfenbüttel since 1685, had a son who was also named Anton Wilhelm and who was baptised, according to the baptismal registry of the St. Blasien Domkirche in Braunschweig, on February 20, 1705.43 This same Anton Wilhelm appears in the Kirchenbuch of the Schlosskirche in Wolfenbüttel 38 Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel (NSW), KB. 1 Abt. 1332, 84; DAB 1. Ingeborg Kittel seems to be the only previous scholar, other than those directly citing her, to correctly date Amo’s baptism to 1708; Brentjes places it on the same day one year earlier. Having consulted the original document, we can confirm that Kittel is correct. See Ingeborg Kittel, “Mohren als Hofbediente und Soldaten im Herzogtum Braunschweig-​Wolfenbüttel,” in Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch, vol. 46, ed. J. König, Braunschweig: Selbstverlag des Braunschweigischen Geschichtsvereins, 1965, 78–​103,  85. 39 NSW 17 III Alt. 120, 123; DAB 2. The receipt for the period from 1716–​1717 may in fact be for another court servant named Anton Wilhelm Mohr, who will be discussed later. 40 NSW 4 Alt 19, Nr. 465. This is one of the few documents from Amo’s own hand that Brentjes failed to include in DAB. 41 NSW 3 Alt. Fb. 2, Nr. 1; DAB 3. 42 Firla, “Anton Wilhelm Amo (Nzema, heute Republik Ghana). Kammermohr—​Privatdozent für Philosophie—​Wahrsager,”  59. 43 NSW 7 Kb. 76, Nr. 58. “Anthon August der Mohr, Fürst *** Pat. Comp. 1 Ihro Hoch Fürst durchl. Herzog Anthon Ulrich 2) Ihro durchl Erb=Prinz August Wilhelm 3) Ihro Durchl. Prinz Ludewig Rudolph./​das Kind Anthon Wilhelm./​Der Tauf actus ist geschehen in Henning Witneffern Haus auf dem Bohlweg.”

16  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations again in 1721, at the time of his confirmation. While further research is necessary, it is clear that the two Anton Wilhelms have been—​unsurprisingly—​ conflated by subsequent researchers on at least two occasions, and perhaps more often than this. Thus Paulin Hountondji writes that thirteen years after his baptism, Amo was “confirmed in the same chapel,” that is, in the Salzthal Chapel. Hountondji continues: “The register of worship, in which the ceremony is recorded, then calls him ‘Anton Wilhelm Rudolph Mohre,’ the third name being taken from Ludwig Rudolph, another Duke of Brunswick who was to succeed Augustus Wilhelm as the head of the Duchy.”44 The entry in the Kirchenbuch to which Hountondji is referring however records not the confirmation of Anton Wilhelm Amo, but of Anton Wilhelm, the son of Rudolph August. The third name is not taken from another duke, at least not directly, but from this Anton Wilhelm’s own father. Brentjes as well evidently takes archival sources referring to Anton Wilhelm Mohr as sources for reconstructing the life of Anton Wilhelm Amo. The receipt for expenses from Easter 1716 to Easter 1717, mentioned earlier and included in Brentjes’s volume of documents related to Amo’s life, is made out in the name of a “Mohr Anthon Wilhelm.” It is nearly certain that, just like Rudolph August Mohr, his son Anton Wilhelm Mohr would also be expected to learn to maintain his own finances from an early age. It is accordingly highly likely that the document cited by Brentjes as pertaining to Anton Wilhelm Amo in fact pertains to Anton Wilhelm Mohr. This fact in turn might cause us even to look at the entry in the baptismal registry, which we conventionally associate with Amo, in a new light. It reads, simply: “Den 29. Juli ist ein kleiner mohr in der Salzthal-​Schloss Cappell getauft u. Anthon Wilhelm genannt worden. Die Gevatern waren die hiesige sämbtl. Hochfürstl. Herrschaft [On July 29 a little Moor was baptised in the Saltzthal Castle’s Chapel, and was named Anthon Wilhelm. The sponsors were the illustrious ruling family].” There is no way to rule out the possibility that it is Mohr, and not Amo, who is the subject of this entry, though the fact that there is another baptismal entry for a “Moor” named Anton Wilhelm, from 1705, before Amo’s arrival in Wolfenbüttel, makes this possibility unlikely. We also know that Anton Wilhelm Mohr died on September 23, 1754, at precisely seven in the evening, at the Sophiental Schloss in Wendeburg that Elisabeth Sophie Marie had used as a retreat since her husband, who 44 Paulin Hountondji, “An African philosopher in Germany in the eighteenth century:  Anton-​ Wilhelm Amo,” in his African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, p. 115.

Introduction  17 left her as his widow in 1731, gifted it to her in 1724. The notice of Anton Wilhelm Mohr’s death in the Sophiental registry tells us that he had been her loyal servant, and that he was buried in the Sophiental cemetery at the age of fifty, thus forty-​nine years after the first record of the baptism of a “Moor” named Anton Wilhelm at Wolfenbüttel.45 We may be certain that the Anton Wilhelm who died at Sophiental in 1754 is not Anton Wilhelm Amo; there is too much documentary evidence attesting to the fact that the African philosopher is, by this time, quite far away. In any case it is not terribly surprising that there were two Anton Wilhelms of roughly the same age. At Wolfenbüttel, as elsewhere in European courts, African servants typically took the names of the members of the ducal family they served. The first African servant at Wolfenbüttel was a certain Augustus, who was baptised, with Duke August’s consent, on November 7, 1653. Without doubt the most renowned African at the court of Braunschweig-​Wolfenbüttel prior to Amo (and even perhaps after Amo, from a local perspective), was the father of the other Anton Wilhelm, Rudolph August Mohr, to whom we have already been introduced. Mohr had been brought as a slave by a Portuguese Jewish merchant to Leipzig, in 1684 (ownership of slaves being recognized or at least tolerated in Germany for travellers who arrive with them from other lands where slavery is legal), at the cost of fifty Reichstaler, thus for an amount roughly equivalent to nine months of Amo’s Kostgeld. The slave is reported to have entered the main church of Leipzig during the Easter mass that year, “where he let out a great and pitiful cry, which woke up the whole city [woselbst er ein grosses und erbärmliches Geschrey angefangen so dass darüber die gantze Stadt wach geworden].”46 Duke Rudolph August happened to be in Leipzig that day, and arranged to buy Rudolph August Mohr’s freedom from the merchant, taking him into his own court and preparing him for baptism, which took place in 1689. In 1703 Mohr married the African court servant Juliana Rosina. They had one son, Anton Wilhelm, to whom we have already been introduced, and one surviving daughter, Sophie Henriette, baptised in 1708. Documents 45 NSW 1 Kb. Alt 1222, Nr. 742: “den 23 September, abends um 7 Uhr, starb Anthon Wilhelm Rudolph Mohr, bey ihro durchl. hertzogin Elis: Soph. Marie gnugsamer Kammer Diener; und wurde den 26 huiusd. unter ansehliche Gefolge auf dem Sophienthaler Kirchhof begraben, die Zeit seines alters, war, 50 Jahr.” 46 “Beständiges Andencken der Redlichkeit des Weyland Hoch-​ Fürstl. Cammer-​ Dieners Rudolph Mohrens,” Handbibliothek des Stadtarchivs Braunschweig (HSB), B II 325; cited in Ingeborg Kittel, “Mohren als Hofbediente und Soldaten im Herzogtum Braunschweig-​ Wolfenbüttel,” in Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch, vol. 46, ed. J. König, Braunschweig: Selbstverlag des Braunschweigischen Geschichtvereins, 1965, 78–​103, 80.

18  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations show that Rudolph August Mohr had secured written assurances from Duke Anton Ulrich and his son Duke August Wilhelm of financial support, and that the couple managed their own finances. Rudolph August Mohr died on March 21, 1725, in Wolfenbüttel, two years before the young Amo left Wolfenbüttel for Halle. It is in his published obituary that we learn the story of Rudolph August’s cry in the Leipzig church years earlier, and of the Duke’s transaction with his Jewish owner. The obituary portrays the event as a sort of liberation, and indeed a salvation of the Moor’s soul. This triangulated social dynamic, between Christian Europeans, Jews, and baptised Africans, will be a significant one, as we will see, throughout Amo’s own life. We learn from the obituary that after his baptism Mohr had initially wished to study theology, but that the duke in turn convinced him to devote himself “with the deepest loyalty and untiring devotion to the most humble service of the most serene persons.”47 This is quite remarkable when we consider it in relation to the life of Amo. Many aspects of the two men’s lives overlap: the centrality of baptism, independent finances, unmistakable feelings of care, however paternalistic, on the part of the duke. Yet Rudolph August Mohr’s desire to study theology is shot down by the very same patron who would later, we have reason to believe, encourage Amo to study philosophy. What was the difference between the two cases? Did the duke regret his earlier opposition to Mohr’s intellectual ambitions? Or did Amo show more promise, or perhaps more determination, than his predecessor? Whatever the answer, it is clear that Amo was brought up in a context in which, though freedom was limited, it was not entirely unusual to acknowledge and encourage the intellectual cultivation, as well as the day-​to-​day independence, of African servants. What, we may wonder, might Amo’s continuation and realization of what remained for Mohr only aspirations suggest to us about a possible intergenerational bond between these two? And what does this possibility suggest about Amo’s relationship to the other Anton Wilhelm, Mohr’s biological son? After Amo’s handwritten receipt, some years go by without a trace of the young philosopher. This 1720 note was written in Latin, and it is indeed reasonable to suppose, with William E. Abraham,48 that Amo had by this time 47 “Beständiges Andencken der Redlichkeit des Weyland Hoch-​Fürstl. Cammer-​Dieners Rudolph Mohrens,” HSB B II 325: “woselbst er sich Anfangs zu der Theologie praepariren wollen; Nachgehends hat die hohe Gnade und ungemeine Affection Sr. Hoch-​Fürstl. Durchl. ihn bewogen dass er sich mit tieffster Treue und unermüdeten Fleiss auf die unterthänigste Aufwartung Durchlauchtigster Persohnen applicirt.” 48 Abraham, “Anton Wilhelm Amo,” 192.

Introduction  19 acquired his literacy, and indeed his Latinity, studying at the Wolfenbüttel Ritterakademie. It is also possible that he was educated by private tutors at the Hof itself. 1.2.1.  Ethiopian, Christian, and Latin The next documentary source shows him enrolling, seven years later on June 9, 1727, at the University of Halle.49 It is, again, written in his own hand, in Latin: “Antonius Guilielmus Cognominatus Amo. Aethiops.” In a separate column, where other students have given the names of German cities, Amo writes: “Ab Aximo in Guinea.” Taken together, these fragmentary bits of information show that “Ethiopian” here is, in keeping with its common usage at the time, not meant to indicate that Amo originates from the country or region of Ethiopia, for he tells us explicitly that he comes from Guinea. Abram Petrovich Gannibal, mentioned earlier, who would become godson to Peter the Great of Russia, and whose life course is parallel to Amo’s in significant ways, was long held to be “Ethiopian” as well, and it is only very recent evidence that has shown him to in fact have come from the area of Lake Chad in what is today Cameroon.50 It is clear that many Europeans had only the vaguest understanding of African geography, and that some may have conceived all of West Africa south of the Sahel as included within Ethiopia. In the encomium written by the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johann Gottfried Kraus, included as an appendix to Amo’s 1734 Impassivity, we read that Amo “first saw the light of day in the furthest part of Africa, looking toward the East.” Hountondji plausibly speculates that here Kraus is confusing Axim, which is in today’s Ghana and which Amo explicitly identifies as lying in Guinea, with the city of Axum in Ethiopia, which had already been well-​ known in antiquity.51 There may however be a deeper reason for the identification of Amo, and indeed of Gannibal, as “Ethiopian.” This demonym had long been used with intentional looseness to denote a semi-​mythical and always very positively construed land. This mythification took two principal forms: either Ethiopia was the great Kingdom of Kush of pagan antiquity, or it was the great African bastion of Christianity. Interestingly, Duke Anton Ulrich, whose early 49 Universitätsarchiv Halle:  Matrikel der Universität, Rep.  4 Sektion XVII Nr. 5 Bd. 3 Lfd. Nr. 488; DAB 4. 50 See Hugh Barnes, Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg, London: Profile Books, 2005. 51 See Paulin Hountondji, “An African Philosopher in Germany in the Eighteenth Century: Anton-​Wilhelm  Amo.”

20  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations libretto praising the moral purity of Africans we have already seen, was also the author of a fairly significant novel, already mentioned, Die römische Octavia (The Roman Octavia), written between 1677 and 1707,52 which takes place largely in the Meroite or Kush kingdom, and features Ethiopian royalty among its key characters. In the novel, the children of Roman royalty are habitually sent to Ethiopia to study under the “gymnosophists,” an ancient sect more likely hailing from India, but traditionally associated with a pure variety of pagan wisdom, uncorrupted by the decadence and artificiality of European life. As Firla has noted, Anton Ulrich is drawing heavily on Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Romance of the third century CE, which provides an early template for the idea that Ethiopia is a land of both nobility and wisdom.53 Anton Ulrich was completing this work at around the time as the young Amo arrived at Wolfenbüttel. For the understanding of “Ethiopian” as synonymous with “African Christian,” it will be helpful to briefly consider the life and legacy of the African author Juan Latino (1518–​1596), who flourished in the Spanish Renaissance. Latino is principally known for his 1573 poem, the Austriadis carmen, which celebrates the Habsburg victory against the Ottomans in the 1571 battle of Lepanto. According to Baltasar Fra-​Molinero, Latino’s adopted surname itself, as the child of slaves of the Duke of Sessa who lacked a surname of their own, is a marker of his struggle for legitimacy within the world of European Christian learning: “Being eloquent in the language of orthodoxy—​Latin—​seemed to Juan Latino the best way to assure his rightful place in the human fold.”54 And it was in virtue of his cultivated Latinity, in turn, that the black author could claim to be “Ethiopian,” in the very special sense in which this designation was understood in the Christian imagination in the Renaissance. “By calling himself an Ethiopian,” Fra-​Molinero explains, “Juan Latino proclaimed his black skin in classical terms but also established his connection with the Christian religion.”55 Now of course we cannot expect the experience of Amo to be the same as Latino’s more than a century before and at the other extreme of the European continent. And yet, in the one case as in the other, the importance of Christian baptism and of mastery 52 Anton Ulrich Herzog von Braunschweig-​Wolfenbüttel, Die römische Octavia, erster bis sechster Theil, Braunschweig: J. G. Zilliger, 1712. 53 Firla, “Anton Wilhelm Amo (Nzema, heute Republik Ghana). Kammermohr—​Privatdozent für Philosophie—​Wahrsager,”  57. 54 Baltasar Fra-​Molinero, “Juan Latino and His Racial Difference,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, ed. T. F Earle and K. J. P. Lowe, 326–​44, 334. 55 Fra-​Molinero, “Juan Latino and His Racial Difference,” 336.

Introduction  21 of Latin for overcoming obstacles in European society, do seem to resonate with one another. Latino’s life was memorialized in the comedic play by Diego Jiménez de Enciso, entitled simply Juan Latino and composed around 1620 (likely only printed, however, in 1652). This playwright was treasured by Miguel de Cervantes and other more prominent Spanish men of letters, and it is at least possible that his work was known in Germany a century later, or at least that some of its central themes were transmitted indirectly. In Juan Latino the playwright portrays his subject humanely, as a moral agent with unique problems and challenges, rather than as a stock character. Latino is also represented, so to speak, as a model minority, and his full assimilation and submission to the Christian faith are contrasted with the perceived alien status of Jews and Muslims. A Jewish character in the play small-​heartedly protests against Latino’s occupation of a university chair, while another character, an unbaptised Moor, fights against the victory of Christianity in Spain. The play, in short, is rife with bigotry, just not against the Black Christian author of Latin poetry. Jiménez de Enciso does derive much of the comic force for his play from the dynamics of interracial marriage, but the comedy here may be interpreted no less difficultly as social satire than as based on the conceit that such a marriage is intrinsically ridiculous. Amo was himself the subject of a minor comical work, published by Johann Ernst Philippi in 1747, which we will discuss in further detail in the next subsection.56 Philippi’s work is a poem and not a play, and here as in Juan Latino the humor is derived from Amo’s love for a European woman, a certain Astrine. Unlike the case of Latino, both the historical person and the character in the play, the love expressed by Amo the fictional character (and perhaps the real Amo too) is unrequited, and the poem seems to condemn him for even considering that he might hope to be loved by her. And yet Philippi’s work does seem to show at least some continuity with the earlier play, and at least a plausible argument could be made that its author, like Jiménez de Enciso, is attempting social satire, rather than a straightforward attack on Amo, as has generally been supposed. Interestingly, in Peter the Great’s Moor, Aleksandr Pushkin’s unfinished 1827 novel about his 56 Johann Ernst Philippi, Belustigende poetische Schaubühne, und auf derselben I. Ein poßirlicher Student, Hanß Dümchen aus Norden, nebst Zwölf seiner lustigen Cameraden. II. Die academische Scheinjungfer, als ein Muster aller Cocketten. III. Herrn M.  Amo, eines gelehrten Mohren, galanter Liebes-​Antrag an eine schöne Brünette, Madem. Astrine. IV. Der Mademoiselle Astrine, parodische Antwort auf solchen Antrag eines verliebten Mohren, Cöthen:  In der Cörnerischen Buchhandlung, 1747.

22  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations own great-​grandfather Gannibal, the central element revolves, once again, around the question of the suitability of a “Moor” for requited love from a European woman. “Am I really fated to live out my life in solitude,” Pushkin’s fictional Gannibal wonders, “without knowing the greatest pleasures and the most solemn duties of a man, just because I was born beneath the fifteenth parallel?”57 This is the great Russian author writing in the early nineteenth century about his own African ancestor, yet he is continuing a theme that we already saw in seventeenth-​century Spanish theatre, and that also, evidently, appears in Philippi’s poem in Germany in the mid-​eighteenth century. Seen in this broad context, it seems somewhat hasty to conclude, with Brentjes, that the work in question is a mere Spottgedicht,58 a libellous or insult-​mongering poem, rather than being rooted in a particular genre that, however tinged with the racism of its time, is also concerned with investigating and engaging with this racism, portraying its African protagonist as a complicated human being with sincere and individual hopes and desires. Like Latino, Amo’s social identity seems to have been forged in contrast with that of two other problematised groups:  Jews and Moors. Although Amo is sometimes himself identified as a “baptised Moor,” when this term is used alone, without a modifier, it is usually a synonym of “Turk” or “Muslim.” We do not know much at all about Amo’s views on Islam. In the 1738 Tractatus he does specify in the section on “Theology” that he is only speaking here of Christian theology. “The Theology of the Gentiles is one thing, that of the Turks another, and so on for the diversity of nations.”59 Firla has highlighted this passage as significant, to the extent that it is willing to grant to non-​Christian peoples their own theology, on an apparently equal standing with, if fully separate from, Christian theology, rather than limiting the religious life of heathens or Muslims to “superstition.”60 We have, in any case, a good deal more evidence of Amo’s direct contact and interaction with Jewish students. In his personal life he developed a close friendship with a Jewish medical student at Halle, Moses Abraham Wolff, who studied philosophy with Amo in the mid-​1730s before obtaining his degree in 1737. 57 Our translation. The Russian title of Pushkin’s work, Arap Petra Velikogo, shows again the vagueness and fluidity of the ethnoracial categories in question: in Russian a “Moor” is an arap, a variant of the word “Arab.” 58 DAB 284. 59 A. W. Amo, Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi, General Part, Chapter I, Member IX, §2, Note I, p. 15. “Notanter dico, Theologia Christianorum. Alia enim Theologia Gentilium, alia Turcarum, alia & alia pro diverstitate Christianorum.” 60 Firla, “Anton Wilhelm Amo (Nzema, heute Republik Ghana). Kammermohr—​Privatdozent für Philosophie—​Wahrsager,”  64.

Introduction  23 The two were so close, in fact, that Amo composed a poem for Wolff, which was included at the end of the latter’s dissertation De Morborum inconsulta ratione suppressorum revocatione (On the Remission of Diseases Suppressed by an Unknown Cause).61 This was evidently a deep and important friendship, and as Steven and Henry Schwarzschild note, although in his poem Amo “may be only a conventional phrase-​monger, referring to Wolff ’s immediate kin[, i]t is, however, hard not to discern . . . a broader concern also—​that Wolff ’s fellow-​Jews, like Amo’s own fellow-​blacks, together finally achieve the human and social dignity of which they have so long been robbed.”62 1.2.2.  Between Halle, Wittenberg, and Jena We have taken a long but necessary digression to consider the possible significances of Amo’s self-​identification as “Ethiopian” in the 1727 student registry of the University of Halle. But let us return now to the documented moments of Amo’s early career. We next see a sign of him in a short report in the Wöchentliche Hallische Frage-​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten of November 28, 1729, presumably written by Johann Peter von Ludewig.63 The author tells us that a “baptised Moor” who had previously been in the service of the Duke of Wolfenbüttel, had proved to be a very good student and, after mastering Latin, had gone on to study “public and private law.” He was accordingly authorized to hold a public disputation.64 “So that the argument of the disputation should be appropriate to his situation,” Ludewig continues, “the topic De jure Maurorum, or the law of Moors, was chosen.”65 He goes on to summarize what may have been part of an anti-​slavery argument, already quoted in part earlier but worth quoting at greater length here:

61 DAB 54. The poem consists in seven lines with three rhymed couplets:

Dein aufgeweckter Geist im klugen meditiren, Und unermüdter Fleiss im gründlichen Studiren, Hoch Edler, macht dass Du in der Gelehrten Orden Ein Stern, ein heller Stern, der ersten Grösse worden, Der immer heller wird in neuer Ehren-​Schein. So einen grossen Lohn giebt Weissheit ihren Sohnen. Dich und die Deinigen in lauter Segen kröhnen. —​Dises sezet seinem hochgeehrtesten Freunde glückwunschend hinzu. Anton Wilhelm Amo. Von Guinea in Africa, der Philosophie und Freyen Künste Magister legens. 62 Steven and Henry Schwarzschild, “Two Lives in the Jewish Frühaufklärung:  Raphael Levi Hannover and Moses Abraham Wolff,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 29, no. 1 (1984): 229–​76, 265f. 63 Wöchentliche Hallische Frage- ​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten, No. XVIII, November 28, 1729, 272–​73; DAB  5–​6. 64 Wöchentliche Hallische Frage- ​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten, 272; DAB 5. 65 Wöchentliche Hallische Frage- ​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten, 273; DAB 6.

24  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations [I]‌t was shown [gezeuget] from laws and from history that the kings of the Moors were enfeoffed by the Roman Emperor, and that every one of them had to obtain a royal patent from him, which Justinian also issued, but it was also investigated how far the freedom or servitude of Moors bought by Christians in Europe extends, according to the laws in use.66

On the Right of Moors in Europe is usually described, by von Ludewig as well as by other commentators following him, as a disputatio and not as a dissertatio. As will be discussed in a later section, it was very common at academic defenses for the defender to display his argumentative ability by defending an argument given to him by someone else. In fact, as we will see, Amo is himself the author of a text which was defended by his student Johannes Theodosius Meiner. In the case of On the Right of Moors in Europe, there is no mention of an author of a text that Amo may have been given to defend, nor of a text that Amo himself wrote. This supposed work may in fact be only a part of the oral history of the University of Halle, whose written trace never extended beyond the summary of the oral defense as reported by von Ludewig. Significantly, in his Vollständiges Verzeichnis aller auf der Königl. Preuss. Friedrichs-​Universität zu Halle  .  .  .  herausgekommener juristischen Disputationen und Programmen (Complete Index of All Legal Disputations and Programmes Coming Out of the Royal Prussian Friedrichs-​University of Halle) of 1789, Christoph Weidlich does not include any disputation by Amo in his list of disputations from the year 1729. This is not conclusive evidence that no such disputation took place, or that von Ludewig has invented his summary of the disputation that year. It means only that there was something about the status of the disputation that disqualified it from inclusion among those that had “come out” (herausgekommener) that year. One possible explanation is that Amo’s disputation was not pro gradu, that is, as will 66 Wöchentliche Hallische Frage- ​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten, 273; DAB 6. Amo’s historical source would be Procopius Wars III, 25, 1–​9: the rulers of the Moors receive their insignia of office (a staff, a crown, a cloak etc.) from the Romans, and so, even after the Moors have become subject to the Vandals, they refuse to fight alongside the Vandals against the Romans, claiming that this would violate their pledges to the Romans in receiving the insignia. (However, they don’t fight alongside the Romans against the Vandals either.) Procopius describes the Moors as receiving the insignia from Justinian’s general Belisarius, although not from Justinian himself. But the Procopius text does not say that the Moorish rulers received any written document from the Romans confirming their status, which is what “royal patent” [Königs-​Patent] seems to imply. And it seems that Amo argued from some legal source, as well as the historical source Procopius. Von Ludewig himself cites this passage of Procopius at length in his Life of Justinian, pp. 373–​74 n384, and it is very likely that he guided Amo to the passage. We thank George Woudhuysen for locating the passage of Procopius, and for advice on this and other possible sources.

Introduction  25 be discussed in a later section, it was not intended to issue in the attaining of a degree. But this would leave unexplained why it is that Weidlich explicitly states, for some other disputations of 1729, that they were pro gradu, while leaving this information out for others still. In his summary von Ludewig states that Amo had been requested “to hold a public disputation” (sich mit einer disputation öffentlich hören zu lassen). It may be that “public,” or “publicly” is doing important work here, and that what von Ludewig is relating is that there has been a sort of “exhibition disputation,” one that adheres to the same format as an official disputation of the sort that Weidlich lists, but that is meant for practice and for the edification of those in attendance, much as a “practice match” in a sporting event might be held between two teams without the outcome of the match officially affecting their ranking. The following year, on September 2, 1730, we find the name of “Anton Wilhelm Amo, von Guinea in Africa,” in the immatriculation list of the University of Wittenberg.67 It is not clear why he moves there from Halle, and although it is in the context of Halle Wolffianism and medical philosophy that Amo’s basic philosophical outlook is shaped, it will be in Wittenberg that Amo will complete his most important philosophical works. The two universities share a complex history with one another, both of them lying at the heart of the Lutheran intellectual world. Wittenberg received many exiles from Halle after Christian Wolff was driven from Halle in 1723 and the now-​dominant Pietists sought to eliminate enduring traces of his intellectual influence. Barely a month after his arrival, on October 17, 1730, there is an official notice in the decanal registry of the Wittenberg philosophy faculty of Amo’s promotion to the rank of Magister. He is identified as “Antonius Wilhelmus Amo, Aximo-​ Guineensis ex Africa, Maurus.”68 The faculty member who signs off on this notice is Samuel Christian Hollmann (1696–​ 1787), a young critic of the Leibnizian-​Wolffian doctrine of preestablished harmony, who in the same year of 1730 had published at Wittenberg a book entitled On Philosophical Reformation (De reformatione philosophica), which is basically Cartesian in its approach to theory construction and its core philosophical commitments.69 67 Universitäts- ​ und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-​ Anhalt:  Wittenberger Matrikel. Bd. 8 Bl. 139; DAB 7. 68 Universitäts- ​und Landesbibliothek Halle: Dekanatsbuch Philosophische Fakultät Wittenberg Bd. 4, 74; DAB 8. 69 On preestablished harmony, see Samuel Christian Hollmann, Commentatio philosophica de harmonia inter animam et corpus praestabilita, Wittenberg, 1724. See also Samuel Christian Hollmann, De reformatione philosophica, Wittenberg, 1730.

26  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations The next appearance of Amo’s name is in a certain Ferdinandus Neoburgus’s Curieuser Hofmeister of 1731. Significantly, this report is published far away from Amo’s local context, in Frankfurt am Main, and offers a very concise account of the defense of his thesis on the rights of Moors two years earlier.70 This mention is followed by nearly two years of silence, after which, in the Hamburgische Berichte von Neuesten gelehrten Sachen (Hamburg Reports on the Most Recent Scholarly Matters) of June 1733, we are offered perhaps the most vivid account of any single event in Amo’s life.71 On May 10 of that year, we learn, Amo was selected to serve as commander of a group of marshalls at the University of Wittenberg for a parade in honor of the visit of the elector of Saxony. “Herr Amo, an African,” we read, “stood in the middle, as the commander of the entire corps, dressed in black, holding his own baton in his hand, and over his vest was outfitted with a wide white ribbon on which the elector’s seal was magnificently displayed in gold with black silk mingled in.”72 His majesty, we learn, was so impressed with the display of the marshalls, with Amo at their helm, that he took his hat off to salute them. The following Monday, all of the students of Wittenberg, whose marshalls are chosen from among the seniors, march to the Wittenberg castle to recite their poems of praise (Gratulations-​Carmen) to the elector. Again, Amo is the commander of the whole group, and he is the first among them to recite a poem. He is wearing the same uniform as before. When the ceremony is over, we are told, Amo and six of his marshalls return home, “and as this solemn act pleased his royal highness very much, . . . he arranged to give to the students six pails of Rhein wine.”73 The role of parade leader or band leader in military or official affairs was one that was long given to people of African descent in Germany. This tradition in fact extended all the way through the era of Bismarck’s Germany, with the last prominent Afro-​German military band leader, Gustav Sabac el Cher, son of the Sudan-​born court servant August Sabac el Cher, dying as recently as 1934.74 70 Ferdinandus Neoburgus, Curieuser Hofmeister, zu allen herrschenden Staaten in der bekannten Welt, Part 2, Frankfurt am Main: Stocks seel. Erben und Schilling, 1731, 1226–​1227. The notice reads, in its entirety: “Jetzo ist zu rühmen: Anton Wilh. Amo, ein getauffter Mohr, welcher Anno 1729. auf der Universität Halle de Jure Maurorum in Europa unter Joh. Petr. von Ludewig disputiret hat.” This is one of the few known early mentions of Amo not documented by Burchard Brentjes. 71 Hamburgische Berichte von Neuesten gelehrten Sachen, Hamburg, June 1733, 366–​68; DAB 9–​11. 72 Hamburgische Berichte, 366–​67; DAB 9–​10. 73 Hamburgische Berichte, 368; DAB 11. 74 See Klaus-​ Peter Merta, “Gustav Albrecht Sabac el Cher und die Rangabzeichen der Militärmusiker,” Zeitschrift für Heereskunde 4, no. 6 (March 2006): 4–​10.

Introduction  27 On April of the following year, 1734, Amo defends his major philosophical work, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind, and is promoted to the rank of Magister legens. In the decanal register of the Wittenberg philosophy faculty, in an entry dated April 16, we find among those added ad numerum Magistrorum Legentium: “M. Antonius Amo, Guinea-​Afer.”75 Both the significance of this rank, as well as the argument and importance of the work on the basis of which he earned it, will be discussed later in this Introduction. The following month, on May 29, comes an important new moment in Amo’s career:  he presides at the public defense by Johannes Theodosius Meiner of the Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those things that Pertain Either to the Mind Or to our Living and Organic Body. Scholars have often been hesitant about the authorship of this work, but while Meiner is the one who defended it, clear signs within the text reveal that Amo not only presided at its defense, but also wrote the work himself. As will be discussed later, this was not so unconventional as it may seem, as the praeses often gave his students the arguments they were obligated to defend. The Distinct Idea repeats many of the same claims as the Impassivity, and indeed refers to this earlier work as being “ours” (“nostro,” where the first-​person plural stands in for the singular). The fact that it was defended by Meiner so quickly after Amo had been promoted to the rank of Magister legens indicates that it was this promotion that also gave him the privilege to preside such defenses, and also that he was eager to begin working in an advisorial capacity and, by this means, to propagate his own philosophical views. Two years go by without any known documentary traces of Amo’s life. On March 24, 1736, Amo writes a letter76 that will eventually end up in the collection of Friedrich Ludwig Schardius (1796–​1855), librarian at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and conservator of ancient medals and coins at the Hermitage Museum. In 1852 Schardius would bequeath this letter, along with several others, to the library of the newly founded University of Dorpat (Tartu), in Estonia. The great majority of other letters in this collection, many of which are from prominent figures in Halle and Wittenberg (not least, Hoffmann, Stahl, Thomasius, Wolff, and Kraus), are, when the recipient is explicitly identified, addressed to a member of the St. 75 Universitäts- ​und Landesbibliothek Halle: Dekanatsbuch Philosophische Fakultät Wittenberg, Bd. 4, 606; DAB 35. 76 Friedrich Ludwig Schardiuse autograafide kollektsioon, No. 3115, University of Tartu Library, on the Internet at https://​dspace.ut.ee/​handle/​10062/​13441, accessed June 17, 2019. This letter was not known to Brentjes. We are grateful to Dwight Lewis for alerting us to this letter and sending us a scan; also to Riin Sirkel for help with the library’s documentation, which is in Estonian.

28  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Amo’s letter is written from Wildenhain, which was at the time a village near Torgau in southeastern Saxony, closer to Leipzig than to Halle. It is not at present clear what brought Amo there. The letter may be read as a sort of job application with a writing sample: Amo refers to “the enclosed,” without further explanation, but we may infer with high probability that the document in question is nothing other than a draft of the Tractatus, to be published two years later. This short letter is filled with effusive praise for its unidentified recipient, and while the rhetoric of it rather overshadows the content, there is still very much we can learn from it. One thing we can learn is that Amo evidently wished at this time to move to St. Petersburg, where the new Academy of Sciences had been founded in 1725 and was now actively recruiting new members from the German-​speaking world. We do not know at present why this desire was not realized. We do however have definitive proof that in the coming years he will not in fact be in Russia. By July 21, 1736, Amo is back at the University of Halle, this time as a Dozent in the philosophy faculty. He is now described in the decanal register of the faculty as “Antonius Wilhelmus Amo, philosophiae ac liberalium artium Magister, ex Africae provincia litorali Guinea ortus [Anton Wilhelm Amo, Master of philosophy and the liberal arts, originating from Guinea, the coastal province of Africa].”77 It is briefly mentioned in the register that Amo had originally studied at Halle before going to Wittenberg, and also, significantly, that taking him on as a Dozent would be a great favor to him, as he has recently been deprived of “his most serene patron” and is now quite destitute. This is evidently a reference to Duke Ludwig Rudolph of Braunschweig-​Lüneburg, who died in 1735 and who had taken over as Amo’s patron after the death of Duke August Wilhelm in 1731 (their father Duke Anton Ulrich, Amo’s first patron, had died in 1714). This note provides us with the first sign of what will be a constant throughout the rest of Amo’s life in Germany: a lack of financial support from the noble family that had initially brought him up and that had, for whatever reason, invested in and supported his education. From now on, Amo is on his own. Some months later, on November 6, there is a report in the Wöchentliche Hallische Anzeigen, likely by Johann Peter von Ludewig, who as we have seen had first written of Amo in 1729, telling us of Amo’s participation in the defense of a medical dissertation by Johann Zacharias Petsche 77 Universitätsarchiv Halle: Rep. 21 Abt. III Nr. 261, 79; DAB 52. “Hrn. Mag. Amo, aus Africa, und daselbst aus Guinea gebürtig, ein Genuiner-​Mohr, aber ein bescheidener und ehrbarer Philosophus mit Vergnügen und nach seiner Art publice opponirt.”

Introduction  29 entitled Dissertatio inauguralis medica, qua Sylloge anatomicarum selectarum observationum continentur (Inaugural Medical Dissertation, containing a Compilation of Selected Anatomical Observations).78 Ludewig relates that at the defense, “Herr Magister Amo, from Africa, and born in Guinea, a genuine Moor, but an unpretentious and reputable philosopher, publicly opposed [Petsche] after his fashion and with pleasure.”79 This encounter is interesting for a number of reasons. The fact that Amo had what was evidently a formal role in the defense of a medical dissertation shows that he had by 1736 taken a more active interest in medicine, perhaps further developing the medical themes and questions that were already clearly present in his two earlier works. As we will discuss later, the boundary between the philosophical and medical faculties at Halle had long been very porous, and it was in fact very common for physicians there to engage with philosophical questions, as the famous Georg Ernst Stahl had done in his polemic against Leibniz, published under the title Negotium Otiosum in 1720,80 and vice versa. Petsche is identified on the title page of the Selected Anatomical Observations as both the author of the text and as the respondent, and the physician and professor of natural philosophy Michael Alberti is identified as presiding. Yet Amo’s otherwise uncredited role of offering “public opposition” appears to be an official one. The work itself, as its title suggests, really is a collection of observations on anatomy based on the study of cadavers, focused principally on osteology, myology, and the reproductive system. There does not seem to be much “philosophy,” in our understanding of the term. But this understanding, evidently, did not limit Amo’s range of interests. Another year passes. On October 4, 1737, Amo’s friend and former student, Moses Abraham Wolff, defends his medical dissertation On the Remission of Diseases Suppressed by an Unknown Cause,81 to which Amo appends his congratulatory poem. It is likely that Amo was in attendance at the defense, as was Wolff ’s advisor, the famous Friedrich Hoffmann. The latter occupied the first chair in medicine at the University of Halle, and was a career-​long adversary of G. E. Stahl, who occupied the second chair. Hoffmann was an important proponent of iatromechanism, or the medical 78 See Johannes Zacharias Petsche, Dissertatio inauguralis medica, qua Sylloge anatomicarum selectarum observationum continentur, Halle: Typis Io. Christiani Hendelii, 1736. 79 Wöchentliche Hallische Anzeigen, November 6, 1736, 719; DAB 53. 80 See François Duchesneau and Justin E. H. Smith (ed. and tr.), The Leibniz-​Stahl Controversy, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. 81 See Moses Abraham Wolff, De Morborum inconsulta ratione suppressorum revocatione, Halle, 1737.

30  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations study of the human being on the basis of a model of the human body as a machine. Amo’s association with Hoffmann at Halle places him at the heart of a number of important medical-​philosophical debates of great importance both for understanding the legacy of mechanism and vitalism in eighteenth-​ century Germany, as well as for understanding the institutional history of the University of Halle. We will return to these questions later. Here we will content ourselves with noting that Amo’s friend Wolff would go on to a fairly unexceptional medical career in Berlin. If their friendship was an enduring one, this could in part explain a later unsubstantiated report made by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach82 that during another of his “silent” periods in the 1740s, Amo too would find himself in Berlin. Future research on Wolff ’s career might turn up hints of encounters there with Amo. The following year, in 1738, Amo is mentioned by Carl Günther Ludovici, in a book about Wolffian philosophy (that is, the philosophy of Christian Wolff, not of Moses Abraham Wolff) entitled Ausführlicher Entwurf einer vollständigen Historie der Wolffischen Philosophie (An Extensive Outline of a Complete History of the Wolffian Philosophy).83 Amo is cited as “one of the most prominent Wolffians,”84 alongside several others, and brief mention is made of the Distinct Idea, written by Amo and defended by Meiner in Wittenberg four years earlier. 1738 is also the year of publication of Amo’s most mature and by far most lengthy philosophical work, the Treatise on the Art of Soberly and Accurately Philosophizing (hereafter, the Tractatus). We do not have space in this introduction to summarize this work’s many aims and arguments. Here we will only note that it was long in the making, and is best understood as part of a trilogy that also includes the Impassivity and the Distinct Idea. Amo alludes to these works on several occasions in the Tractatus. The first explicit mention of Amo’s magnum opus (as we have seen it is implicitly mentioned in the Schardius letter in 1736, and hints of its existence as a project occur already in the Impassivity of 1734) occurs a year earlier than its publication, on March 4, 1737, when he submits it to the dean of the philosophy faculty for approval. In the decanal register on that date we 82 See Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, “Abschnitt von den Negern,” in Magazin für das Neueste aus Physik und Naturgeschichte, Band 4, Teil 3, Gotha, 1787, 9–​11. 83 Carl Günther Ludovici, Ausführlicher Entwurf einer vollständigen Historie der Wolffischen Philosophie, Teil III, Leipzig, 1738. For a thorough study of the grounds for the characterisation of Amo as a Wolffian, see Yawovi Emmanuel Edeh, Die Grundlagen der philosophischen Schriften von Amo. In welchem Verhältnis steht Amo zu Christian Wolff, dass man ihn als “einen führnehmlichen Wolffianer” bezeichnen kann?, Essen: Die blaue Eule, 2003. 84 Ludovici, Ausführlicher Entwurf, 230; DAB 55.

Introduction  31 find the note: “Amo submitted a logical writing for censura.”85 The censura here should not be understood as an official body that suppresses heretical ideas. In Latin, as indeed in early modern English, one may submit a work to the “censure” of the public, or of one’s peers. Here Amo may simply have sent a draft of the Tractatus to his patrons, or to his dedicatees, in order to gain their approval for his dedications. When Amo next appears it is mid-​summer, 1739, and he is now in Jena. He has written a letter, on June 27, to the members of the philosophy faculty there, introducing himself.86 He tells the professors that he is indigent, but also that he is very industrious. No mention is made of his previous noble connections in Wolfenbüttel. He gains a particularly strong supporter in the dean of the faculty, Friedrich Andreas Hallbauer, who writes a note to his colleagues on June 29, two days after Amo’s initial introduction, presenting various options for the “nostrification,” or the transfer of credentials from one university to another, for this impoverished philosopher: “[H]‌e would either have to be nostrified at no cost, or the cost should be suspended until such time as he gains earnings here; or he should be permitted provisionally to teach, until we can see whether he receives steady applause, in which case he should be allowed to be officially nostrified.”87 Hallbauer concludes, “I will be pleased if you are of the same view,”88 and indeed most of his colleagues are. One professor at Jena, identified only as “Wideburg,”89 presents a number of reasons why Amo’s request should be supported, even before those of other applicants: (1) in his early childhood he was taken from another part of the world; (2) he has turned from paganism to the Christian religion; (3) he has been entirely cut off and abandoned by his family and their associates; and thus (4) possesses nothing other than what he earns through his own industriousness. Since he does not wish to beg, but rather seeks to feed himself in an honest way, we should plainly help him to the extent possible.90 85 “M. [= Magister] Amo scriptum logicum censurae submisit”: Universitätsarchiv Halle: Rep. 21 Abt. III Nr. 261, 83; DAB 59. 86 Universitätsarchiv Jena: Bestand M 97 Dekanatsakten III Bl. 64; DAB 276. 87 Universitätsarchiv Jena: Bestand M 97 Dekanatsakten III Bl. 63r.; DAB 277. 88 Universitätsarchiv Jena: Bestand M 97 Dekanatsakten III Bl. 63r.; DAB 277. 89 This is presumably Johann Bernhard Wiedeburg, rector of the university of Jena in summer semester, 1739. See Siegmund Günther, “Wiedeburg, Johann Bernhard,” in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, vol. 42, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1897, 379f. 90 Universitätsarchiv Jena: Bestand M 97 Dekanatsakten III Bl. 63v.; DAB 278.

32  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations An arrangement is worked out, and on July 17 Amo presents his first lesson plan for a lecture course in the Michaelmas term, 1739. It includes a curious mixture of topics, listed in his own handwriting, such as [p]‌arts of the more elegant and curious philosophy; physiognomy; chiromancy; geomancy, commonly known as the art of divination; purely natural astrology, which is opposed to cryptography; dechifratory, or the art of deciphering, which is opposed to the superstitions of the common people and of the ancients, cut down and rejected by all people, and to those things that are the less commended by their ambiguity.91

Here Amo repeatedly emphasizes that his approach to topics such as astrology is not superstitious, but rather what we would describe today as “naturalistic.” Like Leibniz and many others, Amo is signaling his opposition to the superstitious use of astrology for purposes of fortune-​telling, while still considering the possible influence of the celestial bodies in terrestrial affairs as a legitimate path of inquiry. It would not be surprising if Gallandat, in his report on his encounter with Amo after his return to West Africa, were to overlook some of these distinctions in his interpretation of Amo’s work as that of a “soothsayer” (Gelukzegger). It is interesting to speculate here, nonetheless, on the extent to which Amo’s intellectual activity remained the same in Africa as it had been in Germany. Did he adapt his astrology and divination to the local context, invoking divinities and deploying traditional incantations that would have been familiar to his local clients? Or did he attempt to import European divinatory practices, introducing African clients to foreign divinities and unfamiliar incantations? Did he cater mainly to European clients in Africa, who might have shared the same broad intellectual background as his students in Jena? Or did he move between cultures, while still recognizing the common, indeed universal, concerns at the heart of both European and African traditions of astrology and divination? It is remarkable, whatever the case may be, to think that the skills Amo had cultivated as a philosophy teacher in an eighteenth-​ century German university might have proved useful in his later career as an African soothsayer, and evidence indeed that the intellectual traditions embodied in these two cultural practices might not be as radically different as we ordinarily take them to be.

91 Universitätsarchiv Jena: Bestand M 97 Bl. 95; DAB 280.

Introduction  33 Amo’s Jena lectures do not take place in the buildings of the University of Jena, but rather in a private home, an apartment: apartment number seven, to be precise, on the third floor of a building identified as Aedibus Fabricianis. Monika Firla has compellingly argued that this must be a reference to the address of Johann Andreas Fabricius (1696–​1769), with whom, she contends, Amo lived during his time in Jena.92 Fabricius, somewhat older than Amo, had grown up in Wolfenbüttel and attended the nearby University of Helmstedt. A linguist and philosopher, he was a well-​known controversialist in the era, with a popular following and many enemies. In Leipzig between 1715 and 1718, he was a member of a Pietistic bible-​study group founded by August Hermann Francke, while in later works he began to show a more rationalist and Wolffian influence.93 He became an adjunct instructor at Jena in 1734, and moved to Braunschweig in 1740. In the course description Amo may also be attempting to draw in as many students as possible, and to gain their “applausus,”94 which functioned roughly as an eighteenth-​century equivalent to high teaching evaluations for non-​tenured faculty today. He advertises competence in quite a diverse range of topics, and while, again, it might surprise us to see chiromancy and astrology included in a philosophy course at a purportedly enlightened German university in the early eighteenth century, this variety shows, in part, the real need to ensure broad popular appeal for a university lecturer with a precarious institutional status. Happily, events take a turn for the better for Amo at Jena, at least for a time. In a notice of late 1740, the director of the philosophy faculty at the University of Jena, Hallbauer, gives a picture of Amo’s predicament at that institution, and of the need for the newly hired lecturer to win the favor of his students: On July 8 Master Anton Wilhelm Amo, from Africa, a Moor brought up by the eminent Duke of Braunschweig, was given a response to the letter he sent on the 29th of the previous month, namely, that his nostrification will be granted, but that he must pay the requisite money, namely, 10 taler for Easter and the same amount for Michaelmas, in the coming year, 1740, if he 92 Monika Firla, Ein Jenaer Stammbucheintrag des schwarzen Philosophen Anton Wilhelm Amo aus dem Jahr 1746, Stuttgart: AfriTüDe, 2012, 29f. 93 See Johann Andreas Fabricius, Vernünftige Gedanken von der moralischen Erkenntnis der menschlichen Gemüther, Jena, 1728. 94 William Clark translates “applausus” in the context of eighteenth-​century German universities as “large enrollments.” See Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 360.

34  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations is able to earn it by teaching and is able to gain applause. He is very happy with this.95

Nearly a year passes. Then, on May 5, 1740, we have one of the most poignant traces left behind by Amo. He has written a dedication in a book belonging to his friend, and likely his student, Gottfried Achenwall, later famous as a writer on political science including economics and statistics. It is a quotation from Epictetus, who is in turn citing Euripides:  “He is wise who accommodates himself to necessity, and is conscious of divine things.”96 He signs it “Antonius Guilielmus Amo Afer, Philos. et Art. Liberal. Magister Legens.” We can only speculate about the circumstances that motivated Amo to invoke this morsel of wisdom transmitted by the Stoic tradition, and about whether it had as much to do with his own plight as with Achenwall’s, for whom it was intended. After many years of manifesting his own freedom, of struggling and advancing, could Amo have begun to resign himself to the limits imposed on his freedom, simply, first of all, by the fact of being a mortal human being, and, second of all, an African, now somewhat stranded in Europe, abandoned by his former patrons, and struggling to make ends meet as a philosopher? Six years go by without a trace, and then, on March 2, 1746, we find—​ thanks to the remarkable discovery made by Monika Firla97—​an entry in an unnamed person’s Stammbuch. On one side of the page there is a slightly adapted quotation, in the original Greek (plus Latin translation) of Epictetus’s Enchiridion 31: “The essence of piety towards God lies in this, to form right opinions about him.”98 He indicates the place and the date, and then he adds: “With these words, and with the monochrome drawing that follows, by his own hand on the following page, sketched out graphically, Anton Wilhelm Amo, African by nationality, Magister legens in Philosophy and the Liberal Arts, and Candidate in Law, entrusts [to you] to keep him in your memory.”99 The drawing is of an unidentified woman, sniffing tobacco. 95 Universitätsarchiv Jena, Bestand M Nr. 739, 192; DAB 279. 96 Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen: Cod. Ms. hist. lit. 48f. Bl. 78; DAB 281. 97 See Firla, Ein Jenaer Stammbucheintrag des schwarzen Philosophen Anton Wilhelm Amo aus dem Jahr 1756. 98 Amo writes: “Τῆς περὶ τοῦ θεοῦ εὐσεβείας τὸ κυριώτατον ἐκεῖνό ἐστιν, ὀρθὰς ὑπολήψεις περὶ αὐτοῦ ἔχειν/​Religionis ac pietatis erga Deum, verum principium est, rectas de EO habere opiniones.” He has taken away Epictetus’s initial imperative, “Be assured that . . . ,” and he has changed Epictetus’s plural “the gods” to “God” in the singular. In the Latin version, he expands “piety” to “religion and piety.” 99 Thüringer Universitäts- u ​ nd Landesbibliothek Jena St. 83: Bl. 210v. “His, unâ cum Subsèquente monochromate, Suâ ipsius manu è regione, graphice adumbrato, perpetuam Sui memoriam commendat Antonius Gvilielmus Amo natione Afer Philosoph. et AA. LL. Magister Legens. Jur. Cand.”

Introduction  35 Underneath her left arm, there is a piece of paper with the words: “Amo Afer fecit” (“Amo the African made this”). It is difficult to establish much with certainty about the context and the subject of this image. Amo has considerable talent as a draftsman, and indeed work of lesser quality was produced by artists who made a living as portraitists. It is almost certain that Amo had long worked at this skill, and it is certainly possible that more of his work will turn up in the future. It is unlikely however that this particular piece is a portrait of anyone in particular, or at least not of someone who sat for it and was there at its creation. An entry in a Stammbuch is done extemporaneously, and typically does not take much time. While taking snuff was in the mid-​eighteenth century a common courtly activity, enjoyed equally by noble men and women, the pose of Amo’s subject, and the cut of her dress, suggest a certain freedom, even a celebration of libertinism, as the intended spirit of Amo’s drawing (if not of the quotation from Epictetus that precedes it). This spirit would certainly be shared by others who signed the book. On February 12, 1747, a certain M. T. Fronius felt inspired to compose in it a straightforwardly pornographic poem.100 Firla is surely correct to hypothesize that we are dealing here with the Stammbuch of a student, in a social circle where bawdy humour is common. Amo is rather more reserved in his words, but his art suggests that he was comfortable in company that included men and women together, enjoying themselves, perhaps becoming entangled emotionally. It is not out of the question that the woman depicted in the drawing is Amo’s love interest, and the same woman who would, a year later, find her way into the already-​mentioned parodical poem as “Astrine.” That poem’s author, Johann Ernst Philippi, appears to have been a psychologically unstable person with a penchant for stirring up trouble. Born in 1700 in Dresden, he finished his legal studies in Leipzig in 1723, and in 1727 was promoted to the rank of doctor of laws in Halle, after which he established himself as a lawyer in Merseburg, in the Duchy of Saxe-​Merseburg. In 1729 he was condemned to two years in prison for his participation in a duel, but fled to Halle, in Brandenburg-​Prussia. For the following year of 1730, we find a noteworthy entry in Weidlich’s Complete Index of legal dissertations defended at Halle. With his own younger brother Ernst Gottlob Philippi as respondens, Philippi defended a work on natural law on April 3, 1731 (Weidlich, whose work appeared in 1789, likely mistakenly dated the work to the previous year; it is also possible that Weidlich is recording the year of

100

ThULB Jena, St. 83: Bl. 140r. See Firla, Ein Jenaer Stammbucheintrag, 16.

36  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations the disputation event, while the published work only came out some months later).101 The work is highly polemical, but does not target any of the contemporary figures associated with Amo at Halle. It is however very likely that Philippi and Amo already crossed paths by 1729, when Philippi arrived at the Halle law faculty and Amo held his own legal disputation (unrecorded, for whatever reason, by Weidlich). In 1731, Philippi was also named professor of German (as opposed to Latin) eloquence at Halle. He began writing strongly polemical works against Christian Wolff, and in 1732 he found himself the target, rather than the author, of a satirical work, indeed the first of three written by Christian Ludwig Liscow,102 at the encouragement of Friedrich Wiedeburg, who in 1746–​1747 would serve as rector of the University of Halle, and in 1757 would publish a biography of Amo’s mentor and supporter Johann Peter von Ludewig. In 1734, evidently feeling shamed and shunned, Philippi relocates to Göttingen, where he fails to obtain a professorship. The following year, in 1735, after failing at a venture to publish a weekly magazine entitled Der Freydenker (The Freethinker), he is expelled from Göttingen, and from there wanders to Helmstedt, Halle, and Jena. In 1740 he is forcibly confined to an institution for debtors and orphans in Waldheim. He is released two years later and immediately begins to write his Regeln und Maximen der edlen Reimschmiede-​ Kunst (Rules and Maxims of the Noble Art of the Rhyme-​Smith), dedicated to the Freemasons of Berlin, and published at his own expense in 1743.103 His unhinged poem, featuring a vicious portrayal of Amo, would appear in 1747, and until his death a decade later in a Zuchthaus (a prison or house of correction, for criminals but also for vagrants and the insane) in Halle, Philippi’s life seems to have degenerated into total disorder.104 However challenging Amo’s own life circumstances were at the time Philippi’s poem appeared, it is difficult to imagine that a character as imbalanced and self-​marginalized as Philippi had become would have had the social standing to do significant damage to Amo’s reputation, or indeed to do significant harm with his insults to Amo’s self-​image. 101 Johann Ernst Philippi, Dissertatio juris naturalis, demonstrans πρῶτον ψεῦδος circa Principium juris naturae, Halle, 1731. 102 Christian Ludwig Liscow, Briontes der jüngere, oder Lob-​Rede, auf den Hoch-​Edelgebohrnen und Hoch-​Gelahrten Herrn, Hrn. D.  Johann Ernst Philippi, öffentlichen Professoren der Deutschen Beredsamkeit auf der Universität Halle, wie auch Chur-​Sächsischen immatriculirten Advocaten, 1732. 103 Johann Ernst Philippi, Regeln und Maximen der edlen Reimschmiede-​Kunst, auch kriechender Poesie, Altenburg: Auf Unkosten des Autoris, 1743. 104 For much of Philippi’s biography we are relying on Berthold Litzmann, “Philippi, Johann Ernst,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 25, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1888, 76–​78.

Introduction  37 On October 23, 1747, we find an advertisement for the poem in the Wöchentliche Hallische Frage-​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten.105 It is listed alongside such other works as The Barbaric Cruelties of the Turks and Tartars and The Life of a Beautiful Englishwoman. It immediately announces itself as belonging to the popular genre of campus raucousness that, since the end of the seventeenth century in Germany, had delighted in poking at the philistines with its insouciant celebration of loose morals. The work, written by Philippi under the obvious pseudonym “M. Leberecht Ehrenhold” (“Mr. Live-​right Uphold-​ honour”), has already made light of a few other figures associated with university life, including the student “Hans Dümmchen of the North.” The principal conceit of the poem is that the main character’s love for Mademoiselle Astrine is unrequited, and her reasons for not loving him, as she expresses them, are nothing more than common racism. It should be pointed out that it is not clear that the author himself takes Astrine’s position, and in fact she is exactly as ridiculous as one would expect a character to be in this genre of poetic parody. Even Astrine, moreover, expresses some sympathy for Amo’s plight, although she insists she cannot satisfy his heart’s desires. Her sympathy does not prevent her from indulging at least one cheap stereotype: “The praise in your letter is thoroughly thought out,” she says, “And Amor has dictated it well to you, Herr Amo/​You have laid it all out assiduously in black and white/​For the one is reflected in your skin, and the other in your teeth.”106 She pleads with him to be reasonable, and herself reasons that people who think they are in love always claim to be in the throes of death—​yet here you are, Amo, she says, alive and well. “My Herr Magister,” she begs him, “be the master of your drives/​And speak not of love.”107 It is remarkable that she addresses him with his academic title. In poetic fiction as in his real life, Amo seems always to have moved between these two poles: sometimes his heritage was pronounced first, sometimes his accomplishments, and sometimes only the one without the other. Astrine then goes on to mention a certain “Mooress, Sylvia, to whom your mouth gave kisses,”108 and insists that “Only 105 Wöchentliche Hallische Frage- ​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten, October 23, 1747, 692. 106 Philippi, Belustigende poetische Schaubühne, 15; DAB 284. “Das Laubwerck deines Briefes ist ziemlich ausgedacht,/​Und Amor hat dir wohl, Herr Amo, es dictiret; Du hast auch Schwarz und Weiss mit Fleiss darum gemacht,/​Weil jenes deine Haut, und dies die Zähne zieret.” 107 Philippi, Belustigende poetische Schaubühne, 17; DAB 292. “Mein Herr Magister, sey ein Herrscher deiner Triebe,/​Und rede nicht von Liebe.” There is no play on words in the original German between “Magister” and “Herrscher,” as there appears, fortuitously, to be in the English “Magister” and “master.” 108 Philippi, Belustigende poetische Schaubühne, 17; DAB 292. “Die Mohrin, Sylvia der dein Mund küsse gab.”

38  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations a Mooress is worthy of your heart.”109 There does not seem to be any disdain here, though there is an essentializing presumption about racial difference, according to which like must remain with like. Again, Astrine is no heroine in this poem; she is as ridiculous as Hans Dümmchen and as the “academic pseudo-​virgin as a model of all coquettes” (Die academische Scheinjungfer als ein Muster aller Cocketten) who makes an appearance after Hans and before Amo. The latter is first introduced as “Herr M. Amo, ein gelehrter Mohr [Herr Amo, a learned Moor],” who has composed a “gallant declaration of love.” So much the worse for Astrine, the poem seems to tell us, if she remains unmoved. Where is the real Amo through all of this? One remarkable new piece of documentary evidence, unknown to Brentjes in his fairly comprehensive collection of documents, is a request, already mentioned briefly, that Amo sent from Jena to the Dutch West India Company in December 1746, seeking passage on a Company ship from the Netherlands back to Africa. The document, written in Dutch by an unknown agent of the West India Company, reads in full: The Request of Anton Wilhelm Amo, born in Axim, lying on the coast of Africa, was read, stating that he, the supplicant, was brought to this country in the year 1707 by a certain Bodel, who at that time was a sergeant in the service of the Company on that coast; that he was taken by the same Bodel to Braunschweig, where the latter met his death; that he, the supplicant, thereafter came into the service of the Duke of Braunschweig, upon whose death he, the supplicant, was advised to return to Guinea but could find no opportunity to do so, and therefore petitions to be allowed to make the transit thereto in the first Company ship that departs or now stands ready. After deliberating on which, it has been found good to grant the suppliant to be allowed to make the transit to Guinea, as a passenger free of transport fees, in the Company ship that stands ready, the galley Catharina.110

This text is significant for a number of reasons, some of which, pertaining to Amo’s earlier life and the circumstances of his arrival in Europe, were 109 Philippi, Belustigende poetische Schaubühne, 18; DAB 293. “Nur eine Mohrin ist blos deines Herzens werth.” 110 Het Nationaal Archief, archive inventory 1.05.01.02, document 401. Thanks to Philip van der Eijk for checking and improving our translation of the Dutch.

Introduction  39 already discussed. As to the circumstances of his departure, one significant insight of the text is that it shows he had the social standing in Europe to make such a request, and the assurance that came with it that he could safely travel on a slave vessel as a welcome guest, without fear of being taken as a slave himself. The request also suggests that Amo had kept at least some minimal contact, likely mediated, with the network of people extending from Africa to the Netherlands that had brought him to Europe decades earlier. This network may have included both Africans and Europeans, and both family members as well as acquaintances of mere convenience. The request also helps us to pinpoint the moment in Amo’s life in Germany at which, evidently, he seems to have had enough, and, after years of struggling to find steady employment, as well as after some scurrilous harassment on the part of Philippi, Amo determined that he would be better off back in his land of origin. As far as is known at present, there are no other available documents written by Amo’s hand, or directly attesting to his activity during his lifetime.111

2.  The History of Amo Reception It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine the boundary between documentary evidence from Amo’s life, on the one hand, and literature on Amo on the other. Texts of the latter sort grow gradually out of texts of the former sort, with new details, generally unsupported by documentary evidence, added little by little, followed next by another layer of interpretation of the details both real and invented. The earliest text of Amo scholarship—​with subsequent sources building off of it, filling it out, or spinning out variations—​is a short paragraph by Johann Christoph von Dreyhaupt in the Pagus Neletici et Nudzici oder Ausführliche diplomatisch-​ historische Beschreibung des Saal-​ Kreyses (The Neletici and Nudzici Region, or, An Extensive Diplomatic-​Historical Description of the Saale District), first published in 1750. Dreyhaupt places Amo’s career at Halle within the context of that university’s openness to members of ethnic and religious minority groups. Dreyhaupt writes: 111 Dwight Lewis has, however, recently discovered at least two further publications that mention Amo during his lifetime, and will be publishing further details on them in due course.

40  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations A baptized Moor by the name of Anton Wilhelm Amo, whose fees had been paid for some years by His Majesty the Elector of Braunschweig-​ Wolfenbüttel, was also permitted to study philosophy and law here; in November, 1729, under the presidence of Chancellor von Ludewig, he defended a legal dissertation de jure Maurorum in Europa, subsequently being promoted to the degree of Magister Philosophiae, and for some time afterwards gave private lessons here.112 Not to mention that various native-​ born and foreigners of the Jewish nation studied medicine here and were promoted to the degree of doctor, among whom were found some particularly talented and learned subjects.113

It is noteworthy that Dreyhaupt, in this work dedicated narrowly to the history of Halle, does not seem to be aware, or does not feel the need to mention (or perhaps feels the need not to mention) that Amo was active at Wittenberg as well throughout the early 1730s. Note also that Dreyhaupt has replaced the word “disputation” from von Ludewig’s source text with “dissertation,” thus perhaps contributing to the origin of the myth of a missing legal text written by Amo. Dreyhaupt’s purpose here is evidently to catalog the various exotic figures that the exceptional intellectual climate of Halle had attracted. On the same page he goes on to mention a (Muslim) Indian named Soltan Gün Achmet from Ahmedabad, and a (Christian) Arab of Damascus named Solomon Negri,114 who had both come to Halle as well.

112 These “private lessons” (collegia privata, or, as here, privatissima) were regular university teaching offered by magistri legentes of the university, but they contrast with the public lectures which professors were paid a salary to give, and which had to be open to all comers. Collegia privata, by contrast, had attendance restricted, typically to paying students. A professor could supplement his income by offering collegia privata alongside his public lectures, but a non-​salaried magister legens like Amo depended entirely on student fees for collegia privata; it was thus an unsteady income, dependent on how many students he could attract in a given semester. 113 Johann Christoph von Dreyhaupt, “Von denen Studiosis,” ­chapter 18, Pagus Neletici et Nudzici oder Ausführliche diplomatisch-​historische Beschreibung des Saal-​Kreyses, vol. 2, Halle: Emmanuel Schneider, 1750, 28. (“Neletici” et “Nudzici” are the originally Sorbian names of the regions [Pagus = German “Gau”] that were fused to form the Saalkreis, the district around Halle, when they were conquered by the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth century.) Brentjes (DAB 296) reproduces a later (but page-​for-​page and word-​for-​word identical) edition of the same text, published by the Verlegung des Waysenhauses in Halle in 1755, so that it apprears, both chronologically and in Brentjes’s sequence of documents, after Zedler’s entry in the Grosses Universallexikon. 114 On the latter, see John-​Paul A. Ghobrial, “The Life and Hard Times of Solomon Negri: An Arabic Teacher in Early Modern Europe,” in The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett, Leiden: Brill, 2017, 310–​31. Negri’s “hard times” parallel those of Amo to a surprising degree. As Ghobrial notes:  “Across all of his writings, a single theme crops up over and over again: disappointment with his lot, complaint about his patrons, unhappiness in his isolation, anxiety about his future, and a keen sense of not being appreciated by those around him” (311).

Introduction  41 The following year, in 1751, Johann Heinrich Zedler includes an entry on Amo in his Grosses Universallexicon (Great Universal Lexicon), evidently incorporating significant material from Dreyhaupt, and indeed citing him explicitly. The entry reads, in its entirety: Amo (Anton Wilhelm), a baptized Moor, originally from Guinea in Africa. His Highness the Elector of Braunschweig-​Wolfenbüttel, at his own expense, sent Amo to study philosophy and law for some years at Halle. In the year 1729, in the month of November, he defended a dissertation in law, with the Chancellor von Ludwig presiding, entitled De jure Maurorum in Europa, or on the law of Moors. In this work he showed [gezeiget] from laws and histories that the kings of the Moors were enfeoffed under the Roman Emperor, and that each of them had to obtain a royal patent, which Justinian also issued. After this, he investigates how far the freedom or servitude of baptized Moors in Europe extends according to the laws in use (see Ludwig’s Universal-​Historie, Part 5, p. 251). Afterwards he obtained the Master’s degree, and for some time gave private lessons in Halle (see Dreyhaupt’s Beschreibung des Saalkreises, Part II, p.  28). He must however have subsequently visited the University of Wittenberg, since we possess from him a Disputationem philosophicam, continentem ideam distinctam eorum, quae competunt vel menti vel corpori nostro vivo & organico, which he publicly defended as praeses in Wittenberg on 29 May, 1734. In this dissertation he refers several times to another dissertation he defended, the Dissertatio de humana [sic] mentis apatheia.115

The “Ludwig” that Zedler cites here is not, as might be guessed, Johann Peter von Ludewig, but rather Gottfried Ludovici, Universal-​Historie vom Anfang der Welt bis auf jetzige Zeit (Universal History from the Beginning of the World to the Current Age), who copies von Ludewig’s original report.116 115 Johann Heinrich Zedler, Nöthige Supplemente zu dem grossen vollständigen Universal-​Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, welche bishero durch menschlichen Verstand und Witz erfunden und verbessert worden, Erster Band: A-​An, Halle and Leipzig: Verlegts Johann Heinrich Zedler, 1751, 1369; DAB 295. 116 Gottfried Ludovici, Universal-​Historie vom Anfang der Welt bis auf jetzige Zeit, unter dem Titul und Gestalt eines ordentlichen Examinis über die Haupt-​Sachen der Kirchen, Politischen, und Gelehrten Historie, abgefaßt, vol. 5, Leipzig: Bey Friedrich Lanckischens Erben, 1744, p. 251. Since Ludovici’s report is not in Brentjes, we give it here, although it gives no new information beyond von Ludewig. Ludovici says, under November 1729, “In diesem Monate hielte auf der Friedrichs-​ Universität Halle, als ein seltsames Exempel, Antonius Wilhelmus Amo, ein getauffter Mohr, welchen der regierende Herzog zu Braunschweig-​Wolffenbüttel studiren lassen, eine Disputation, unter dem Vorsitz des Ioh. Petr. von Ludewig, de iure Maurorum in Europa, oder vom Mohren-​ Recht,” and appends an almost verbatim quote from von Ludewig, “Er hat darinn ex LL. & Historia

42  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Zedler’s only sources in his article, evidently, are Dreyhaupt, Ludovici, and the Distinct Idea, and he cites all of them properly. Zedler appears little aware of what might have brought Amo to Wittenberg. Dreyhaupt says that Amo held the law disputation in Halle in 1729, that he then took a Master’s in philosophy, and that he subsequently held collegia in Halle (which implies that he must first have taken a Master’s): Dreyhaupt is interested only in Halle and environs, and leaves the impression that Amo did all of these things in Halle. Zedler has the Distinct Idea and knows from it that Amo was praeses at that disputation in Wittenberg in 1734, which implies that Amo was magister legens in Wittenberg in 1734, but Zedler guesses that Amo held his law disputation, took his Master’s in philosophy, and held collegia, all in Halle, and then subsequently taught at Wittenberg and defended and presided over disputations there; whereas the truth is that Amo held his law disputation in Halle, then took his Master’s degree in Wittenberg, then taught at Wittenberg and defended and presided over disputations there, and then returned to teach in Halle. Dreyhaupt by his local patriotism, and Zedler unintentionally, contribute to forming a scholarly tradition which has associated Amo more closely with Halle than Wittenberg. What we have been calling the “travel report” of Henri-​David Gallandat is in fact a summary, published in Dutch in 1782 by Isaac Winkelman, of an account that was transmitted to him, likely by Gallandat himself, of a meeting between Gallandat and Amo in the early 1750s.117 Gallandat, Amo’s last known interlocutor, may also have been the last to give a straightforward account of Amo’s intellectual undertakings. Practically all we learn from him is that after his return to the city of Axim, in his home country, the philosopher “lived as a hermit, and was reputed to be a soothsayer. He spoke various languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, High and Low German, was very gezeiget, daß der Mohren ihr König bey dem Römischen Kaiser ehedem zu Lehen gegangen, und jeder von denselben ein Königs-​Patent, welches auch Justinianus ausgetheilet, holen müssen. Hiernechst untersuchet er, wie weit der von Christen erkauften Mohren in Europa ihre Freyheit oder Dienstbarkeit sich nach denen üblichen Rechten erstrecke.” He seems to have misread von Ludewig’s word “gezeuget” as “gezeiget,” but the difference in meaning is slight. Zedler, following Ludovici, also has “gezeiget.” 117 Isaac Winkelman, [Travel Report of Henri-​David Gallandat], “Verhandelingen uitgegeven door het Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen te Vlissingen, ” Negende Deel 9 (1782): 19–​20; Brentjes, DAB, 297–98. According to Gallandat, at the time of his visit to Amo in Africa, “his father and a sister were still alive, and lived four days’ journey inland; he had a brother who was a slave in the colony of Suriname” (20). This shows that while Amo’s family standing may have afforded him a relatively free life in Europe, the fates of all Africans in the period were nonetheless precarious, as someone from the same family could wind up in chattel slavery in the Americas.

Introduction  43 learned in astrology and astronomy, and was a great philosopher.”118 This description suggests, as already discussed, that Amo had taken up a social role in his late life in Africa that was in some respects analogous to that of a philosopher in Europe. It also suggests that he had acquired or re-​acquired the Nzema language to which he would have been exposed in early childhood, as he would not have been able to gain the reputation ascribed to him without the ability to communicate with local people. It may be, also, that Gallandat is simply recording, and perhaps partially misunderstanding, Amo’s account to him of his earlier career in Germany. The report published by Winkelman is followed five years later by a fairly substantial treatment of Amo’s life and legacy from the influential physical anthropologist and philosopher Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the author of one of the earliest works on racial classification, De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Innate Variety of the Human Species) of 1775. In his 1787 article “On Negroes” in the Magazine for the Latest from Physics and Natural History, Blumenbach reports that Amo “had proven himself advantageously in both his writings and as a docent, and afterwards came to Berlin as councillor to the Royal Prussian Court [königl. preuss. Hofrath].”119 This is the earliest known reference to a sojourn by Amo in Berlin. It is hoped that research in the Prussian archives might turn up more evidence. If he was in fact active in high-​ level court politics, it is impossible that he should have left no trace. But it seems to us more likely, in the absence of any new discoveries, that Blumenbach is simply mistaken. His claim will subsequently be echoed, on occasion, by other commentators, including the abolitionist Henri Grégoire, though evidently on the basis of nothing more than what Blumenbach himself says. Grégoire writes, in his 1808 work On the Literature of the Negroes, the longest description to date of Amo’s work, and it is highly admirative. But it is almost entirely a pastiche of earlier sources, including those of Gallandat and Blumenbach. Grégoire does however give some indication of having

118 Winkelman, “Verhandelingen uitgegeven door het Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen te Vlissingen, ” 19–​20. Gallandat reports that Amo afterwards moved to the Dutch West India Company’s Fort St. Sebastian, at Shama, where indeed Amo’s gravesite is still maintained. We do not know the year of Amo’s death. 119 Blumenbach, “Abschnitt von den Negern,” 9–​10. Evidently drawing directly on Blumenbach’s work, the nineteenth-​ century physical anthropologist Friedrich Tiedemann also cites Amo’s accomplishments in his work, Das Hirn des Negers mit dem des Europäers und Orang-​Outangs verglichen, Heidelberg: Karl Winter, 1837, 90. Notwithstanding the ignominious comparison suggested by the title, Tiedemann’s argument is in fact against those who would claim that Africans are closer morphologically to other primate species than Europeans are. He cites Amo as a counterexample to the claim that there are no African philosophers: “Of philosophers, I’ll mention Anton Wilhelm Amo” (90).

44  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations read at least the Impassivity, and he summarizes Amo’s philosophical project there with extreme concision, as follows: Amo, he writes, “seeks to establish the differences of phenomena between beings that exist without life, and those that have life. A stone exists, but is not alive.”120 We will return later to look somewhat more sustainedly at Amo’s analysis of the difference between a stone and a living being; what is important to note at this point is that Grégoire’s principal purpose is simply to testify that Amo lived and wrote, and therefore that the claims of so many others, such as David Hume, that no one of African heritage had ever made any noteworthy intellectual accomplishments, was patently false. A similar invocation of Amo’s work can also be found in at least a few works of Anglophone abolitionist literature of the early nineteenth century. Thus for example the American author Lydia Maria Child, in her 1833 Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans, summarizes Amo’s accomplishments alongside those of several other men of the eighteenth-​century African diaspora.121 There are scattered mentions of Amo over the following century. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a conscious effort begins, particularly in the Anglophone world, to cultivate a distinct tradition of philosophy as practiced by members of the African diaspora, in which the particular historical legacy of this diaspora is expressed and examined. Earlier figures, who did not and could not have identified with such a tradition, are sometimes retroactively conscripted, and Amo is no exception here. Thus W.  E. B.  DuBois makes passing mention of Amo in his 1939 work Black Folk, Then and Now:  An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race.122 And the same year Amo is mentioned in a summary article in the Negro History Bulletin entitled “Negroes in the Field of Philosophy.”123 In 1955 the eminent African American scholar Charles Leander Hill publishes a careful study of the Impassivity along with a fairly thorough biographical survey of Amo’s life.124 120 Abbé Henri Grégoire, De la littérature des Nègres, ou, recherches sur leurs facultés intellectueles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature: suivies des notices sur la vie et les ouvrages des Nègres qui se sont distingués dans les sciences, les lettres et les arts, Paris, 1808, 198–​202, 201. 121 Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833, 167. 122 W. E. B. DuBois, Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race, New York: Octagon Books, 1939. 123 “Negroes in the Field of Philosophy,” The Negro History Bulletin 2, no. 9 (1939): 76. 124 For unclear reasons, the article is published under the title “William Ladd, The Black Philosopher from Guinea.” There is no subsequent mention of anyone named William Ladd in the article; from the very beginning Hill speaks only of Amo, and evidently is not responsible for the interpolation of an unrelated name in the title of his study. See Charles Leander Hill, “William Ladd, the Black Philosopher from Guinea: A Critical Analysis of His Dissertation on Apathy,” The A.M.E.

Introduction  45 There will be a marked shift in writing on Amo over the course of the mid-​twentieth century: from someone who is, so to speak, mentioned, to someone who is used: conscripted as an early representative of diverse intellectual traditions of importance to the authors invoking Amo’s name, not least Marxism, African nationalism, and various hybrids of these. An illustrative example of such an approach can be found in the work of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian political leader and African nationalist thinker, who published his influential work, Consciencism in 1964 in an attempt to fuse the core doctrines of Marxist-​Leninist philosophy with what he saw as some of the basic elements of traditional African thought.125 Unsurprisingly, as a Marxist Nkrumah goes to some lengths to refute philosophical idealism, “the self-​devouring cormorant of philosophy.”126 He distinguishes between two varieties: one that is based in some theory or other of perception, a variety he associates with Berkeley and Leibniz; and one that is motivated by some degree of solipsism, which he associates with Descartes. Nkrumah sees the incipient solipsism contained in Descartes’s cogito argument as based on the fallacy of supposing that, insofar as one can imagine oneself without any bodily member in particular, one can therefore imagine oneself as entirely non-​bodily, and therefore as essentially a thinking thing. Nkrumah appears to believe that Amo, by contrast, rejected the Cartesian account of the mind in favor of a view according to which the mind, in order to accommodate ideas of extended things, must itself be extended, which is to say it must be physically located within at least a portion of the body: The eighteenth-​ century African philosopher from Ghana, Anthony William Amo, who taught in the German Universities of Halle, Jena and Wittenberg, pointed out in his De Humanae Mentis Apatheia that idealism was enmeshed in contradictions. The mind, he says, was conceived by idealism as a pure, active, unextended substance. Ideas, the alleged constituents of physical objects, were held to be only in the mind, and to be incapable of Review 72, no. 186 (1955): 20–​36. The most prominent person by the name of William Ladd was a white American peace activist and founder, in 1828, of the American Peace Society. 125 As Nkrumah explains, “philosophical consciencism . . . will give the theoretical basis for an ideology whose aim shall be to contain the African experience of Islamic and Euro-​Christian presence as well as the experience of the traditional African society, and, by gestation, employ them for the harmonious growth and development of that society.” See Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-​Colonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution, second edition, New York: Monthly Review, 1970, 70. 126 Nkrumah, Consciencism, 18.

46  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations existence outside it. Amo’s question here was how the ideas, largely those of physical objects, many of which were ideas of extension, could subsist in the mind; since physical objects were actually extended, if they were really ideas, some ideas must be actually extended. And if all ideas must be in the mind, it became hard to resist the conclusion that the mind itself was extended, in order to be a spatial receptacle for its extended ideas.127

Subsequently, Nkrumah attributes to Descartes the view that, when the body is harmed, the “pain” that the mind feels can only ever be accounted for as an intellectual cognizance, and subsequent mental distress, of the fully separate mind. Nkrumah sees Amo by contrast as having explicitly argued against this view in the Impassivity: Descartes . . . tried to solve the mind-​body problem by resorting to a kind of parallelism. He instituted parallel occurrences, and thus explained pain as that grief which the soul felt at the damage to its body. On this point, as on several others, Descartes was assailed by the critical acumen of the Ghanaian philosopher Anthony William Amo. According to Amo, all that the soul could do on Descartes’ terms is to take cognizance of the fact that there is a hole in its body or a contusion on it, and unless knowledge is itself painful, the mind could not be said to grieve thereat.128

Nkrumah has, then, attributed to Amo two anti-​Cartesian views:  first, that the mind must be extended in order to accommodate ideas of extended things; and, second, that the mind must somehow be more integrated with the body than Descartes is able to admit, in order for it to properly be said to feel pain when the body is injured, rather than simply to take cognizance of the injury.129 127 Nkrumah, Consciencism,  18–​19. 128 Nkrumah, Consciencism, 87. 129 William E.  Abraham, like Nkrumah, sees Amo’s Impassivity as principally a critique of Cartesian dualism, and he confirms Nkrumah’s account of Amo’s criticism of Descartes on the experience of pain. “Amo claimed confusion,” Abraham writes, “in Descartes’s presentation of the thesis that it was the function of an organ to receive sensible forms (e.g., by feeling) while to judge forms when received (e.g., by taking cognizance of what is felt) was the function of the mind. Yet taking cognizance of bodily pain or contact should not require the mind itself to feel pain or contact, or sense anything at all. A faculty of sense is not an apposite feature of minds. Hence, Amo denied that the mind could feel, urging that sense organs were only a medium, but not an instrument, in a theoretical conception of the occurrence of sensing. In this theory, without sense organs, there would be no sensing; and the entity with the faculty of sense should be the entity comprising living organs, namely the body” (Abraham, “Anton Wilhelm Amo,” 195). (Note that Abraham seems to have been Nkrumah’s

Introduction  47 Amo cites or discusses Descartes on five distinct occasions in the Impassivity. The first occurrence is for corroboration of his own view that the soul cannot undergo passion through contact, since whatever touches or is touched is a body.130 The second occurrence also invokes Descartes approvingly, in order to draw a distinction between the way ideas are formed in the mind of God and of other thinking substances that lack a “very tight bond and commerce with the body.” Amo denies here that there could be any representation in God’s mind, “since representation supposes the absence of the thing to be represented.” Instead, God’s non-​sensory thoughts about created substances are ones, presumably, that concern the concept of these substances directly, as fully present to God’s mind. The third occurrence appears to be an invocation of Descartes, again, in order to clarify the notion of “internal senses,” defining these as “passions or affections of the soul.” However, subsequently Amo will set up the difference between his own view and Descartes’s precisely on this point: he denies that there can be passions of the soul at all, since all sensation occurs only in “the living and organic body.” Amo cites an important letter to Princess Elisabeth, in which Descartes explains that “there are two things in the human soul on which all the cognition that we are able to have of its nature depends, one of which is that it thinks, the other that, united to a body, it is able to act and to suffer together with it.”131 Here Amo states his opposition starkly: “In reply to these words we caution and dissent: we concede that the mind acts together with the body by the mediation of a mutual union. But we deny that it suffers together with the body.” In his final reference to Descartes, Amo again criticizes him, not so much for holding the wrong view of whether or not the soul may experience passions, but rather for contradicting himself on this matter: by his own lights, Amo thinks, Descartes is in truth compelled to share Amo’s own view that the soul, to the extent that it is defined as a thinking thing, cannot undergo passions, since “thinking is an action of the mind, not a passion.” In sum, Amo does indeed criticize Descartes in the Impassivity, but not for the reasons Nkrumah and others have held. Amo does not criticize Descartes for conceiving the mind as excessively distinct from the body, but

source for the discussions of Amo in Consciencism; in fact Abraham may have been something like an unacknowledged coauthor.) 130 He refers to René Descartes, Renati Descartes Epistolae, Partim Latino sermone conscriptae, partim e Gallico in Latinum versae, Part III, Amsterdam: Typographia Blaviana, 1683, p. 420. 131 Descartes, Epistolae Part I, Letter 29, 59.

48  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations rather as not nearly distinct enough. Far from rejecting Cartesian dualism, on the contrary Amo offers a radicalized version of it. For him, all sensation is “suffering” in living beings, which is to say undergoing passion. But if the mind can do nothing but think, then it follows that it can undergo no passions at all. It follows, in turn, that the sensation of pain is something that occurs entirely within the body, while if the mind is involved at all this will be through a simple cognizance of the pain the body is feeling. In other words, the objection that Nkrumah believes Amo is levelling against Descartes, that the mind cannot feel pain, is one that could more rightly be raised against Amo himself. Certainly the greatest single contribution to Amo scholarship in the twentieth century was made by the East German scholar Burchard Brentjes, a historian of the Near East and Central Asia who was involved politically in organizations dedicated to boosting solidarity and fraternity between Eastern Bloc countries and the Arab world and beyond. Brentjes was also a close friend of Nkrumah, and hosted the Ghanaian leader personally on his visits to East Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1968 Brentjes, together with a team of East German scholars based at Halle, publishes an exhaustive collection of direct reproductions of the original published works of Amo, together with reproductions of all published and handwritten sources relating to his life and work. This remains the principal source for Amo research today. That same year the same team published an English edition of Amo’s works, which is accurate enough but which lacks a critical apparatus, and sometimes also lacks sensitivity to the philosophical meaning of the terms and concepts Amo deploys.132 A French edition would follow in 1976, which shares in the same strengths and weaknesses as the English.133 In 1976, Brentjes would also publish his own monographic study, Anton Wilhelm Amo: der schwarze Philosoph in Halle.134 This is a useful guide to Amo’s life and work, and it draws on Brentjes’s own extensive knowledge of the archival sources. The work is presented within a Marxist macrohistorical framework, and tends often to zoom out to wide-​focused considerations of the historical and economic dynamics of the African slave trade. Perhaps the most illuminating aspect of Brentjes’s study comes from the field-​work that 132 Anton Wilhelm Amo, Antonius Guilielmus Amo:  Translation of His Works, ed. Dorothea Siegmund-​Schultze, Halle: Martin Luther University Halle-​Wittenberg, 1968. 133 Antoine Guillaume Amo, Oeuvres d’Antoine Guillaume Amo, French translation Ulrich Ricken and Auguste Cornu, Halle: Université Martin Luther, 1976. 134 Burchard Brentjes, Anton Wilhelm Amo: der schwarze Philosoph in Halle, Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1976.

Introduction  49 he carried out during the time he himself spent in Ghana in the early 1970s. In this connection he interviewed people from Axim who identified themselves as descendants of Amo’s family, and who had preserved memories of Amo’s life in that region through oral transmission. This sort of participant-​ observation in oral cultures, Brentjes understood, can be a part of research in the history of philosophy, and indeed must be, when this history is understood to include traditions, such as those that embody African philosophy, with different institutions and mechanisms of transmission than those familiar in Europe. Here it is worth noting that there has been considerable debate over the past century as to what precisely constitutes a contribution to or an instance of African philosophy. On a certain definition, Amo’s work cannot be considered such a contribution, since he plainly had his intellectual formation within the context of the European intellectual tradition. Thus the Ghanaian scholar Kwame Gyekye writes: The cultural or social basis (or relevance) of the philosophical enterprise seems to indicate that if a philosophy produced by a modern African has no basis in the culture and experience of African peoples, then it cannot appropriately claim to be an African philosophy, even though it was created by an African philosopher. Thus, the philosophical works of the eminent Ghanaian thinker Anton Wilhelm Amo, who distinguished himself by his philosophical acumen in Germany in the eighteenth century, cannot be regarded as African philosophy.135

Paulin Hountondji, for his part, in his groundbreaking work African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, does not discern any distinctively African intellectual themes in Amo’s work; Amo was in Hountondji’s view very aware that he was African, but was responding intellectually to Christian Wolff and other contemporary European philosophers. Yet Hountondji does not for this reason disqualify Amo’s work from counting as African philosophy.136 For Hountondji, the twentieth-​century project of constructing a distinctly African philosophy remained mired in “ethnophilosophy,” that is, “the imaginary search for an immutable, collective philosophy, 135 Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought:  The Akan Conceptual Scheme, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 [1987], 33–​34. 136 Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, especially “An African philosopher in Germany in the eighteenth century: Anton-​Wilhelm Amo.”

50  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations common to all Africans, although in an unconscious form.”137 Such, for example, is what we see in the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels’s work on Bantu ontology,138 and in a more subdued form, some decades later, in the work of Alexis Kagame,139 also on Bantu philosophy, seeking to extract implicit philosophical concepts from ordinary language. Hountondji puts the Bantu “philosophy” transmitted by Tempels and Kagame in scare quotes, which he plainly does not apply to the philosophy of Amo. While Hountondji finds the work of Kagame in particular to be of immense interest, he worries that without a grounding in texts or institutional records, there can be no way to question the authority of that uniquely positioned intermediary who “translates” the ethnophilosophy of oral tradition into philosophy narrowly speaking. But Amo exists as a philosopher precisely to the extent that he is known to us from texts: indeed he is only known to us thanks to institutional records, not least his three philosophical works, but also records such as registration lists and course descriptions. Ironically, while in Hountondji’s view ethnophilosophy is “built up essentially for a European public,”140 the work of someone like Amo, which exists only in its traces from within European institutions, nonetheless qualifies as African philosophy in a full and proper sense: real philosophy, produced by a singular African person, and not as a distillation or translation for European readers of what is supposedly an expression of African collective thinking. Other scholars, in turn, have with varying degrees of explicitness attempted to identify distinctively African contours in Amo’s work. Thus Kwasi Wiredu, following Nkrumah, represents Amo’s contribution to philosophy as principally a rejection and critique of Descartes’s dualistic ontology, arguing further that Amo’s strength lies in his points of disagreement with Descartes, and his weakness in his points of agreement. Cartesian dualism is “a conceptual inconsistency dear to much Western metaphysics,” while Amo’s critique of it, Wiredu speculates, may come from residual commitments that he absorbed from his early life surrounded by fellow members of the Akan culture. “May it not be,” Wiredu asks, “that some recess of Amo’s consciousness was impregnated by the concept of mind implicit in the language and thought of the Akans?” He continues:

137 Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, 38. 138

Placide Tempels, La philosophie bantoue, Elisabethville: Lovania, 1945. Alexis Kagame, La philosophie Bantu comparée, Paris: La Présence Africaine, 1976. 140 Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, 45. 139

Introduction  51 [I]‌n the Akan conceptual framework, insofar as this can be determined from the Akan language and corpus of communal beliefs,141 the feeling of a sensation does not fall within the domain of the mental, if by “mental” we mean “having to do with the mind,” Mind is intellectual not sensate. This is obvious even at the pre-​analytical level of Akan discourse. The Akan word for mind is adwene, and I would be most surprised to meet an Akan who thinks one feels a sensation—​a pain, for instance—​with his or her adwene. No! You feel a pain with your honam (flesh), not with your adwene.142

This is a very intriguing speculation, but what if a more proximate source of Amo’s particular philosophical commitments can be located? Properly understood Amo’s position may not really be a critique of Cartesian dualism at all, or of European metaphysics in general. It may rather be best understood as a response to the prevailing questions and schools of thought in the local context of the Universities of Halle and Wittenberg, and of Protestant Germany more generally, in the early eighteenth century.

3.  The Political and Intellectual Context at Halle and Wittenberg In an earlier work one of us attempted to argue that Amo, upon arrival at Halle for his studies in 1729, had affiliated himself to the liberal, enlightened Wolffians against the more conservative Pietists.143 He, after all, had been explicitly identified as “one of the most distinguished Wolffians,” and had emerged from a nexus at Wolfenbüttel that seems to have been a classic instance of early-​Enlightenment sensibilities within the German nobility. G. W. Leibniz was a frequent visitor at Wolfenbüttel in Amo’s childhood, at which time the great German philosopher was entangled in a bitter controversy

141 Among the declarations in the influential resolution made by the Commission on Philosophy at the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, held in Rome in 1959, is the idea “that the African philosopher must base his inquiries upon the fundamental certainty that the Western philosophic approach is not the only possible one; and therefore . . . that the African philosopher should learn from the traditions, tales, myths, and proverbs of his people, so as to draw from them the laws of a true African wisdom complementary to the other forms of human wisdom to bring out the specific categories of African thought.” Here, Wiredu is implementing this very approach. 142 Kwasi Wiredu, “Amo’s Critique of Descartes’ Philosophy of Mind,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu, Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 200–​206, 204. 143 See Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015, ch. 8.

52  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations with the Halle Pietist physician, Georg Ernst Stahl, and was giving shape to the nascent philosophical views of the young Christian Wolff. But the situation at Halle was in fact more complicated. The boundaries between the Pietists and the advocates of Enlightenment in Protestant Germany in the early eighteenth century are by no means so clear as might appear from a superficial consideration of the different schools of thought. By the time of Immanuel Kant’s mature work144 it will be clear that Pietist influences can be interwoven with Enlightenment bona fides, and much the same possibility seems to have existed as early as the 1720s in Halle. One particularly important point of commonality is that the philosophers of the Leibnizian-​Wolffian Enlightenment and the Pietists alike were intently focused on the practical and theoretical project of promoting missionary activity in the extra-​European world. This project, in turn, stimulated interest in the early development of ethnography and comparative linguistics.145 The University of Wittenberg had been founded in 1502 by Friedrich the Wise of Saxony. Nearly from the beginning, it became the center of intellectual life in Protestant Germany, with Martin Luther himself joining the faculty of theology in 1512. Philip Melanchthon served a term as rector in the academic year 1523–​1524, and played an important role in promoting the development of a new Lutheran natural philosophy, amenable to Aristotle, notwithstanding Luther’s own radical rejection of non-​biblical traditions.146 The University of Halle was in turn founded in 1694 by the Margrave Friedrich III of Brandenburg (subsequently King Friedrich I of Prussia), and from the beginning there was close communication, but also political-​religious tension and rivalry, with Wittenberg, nearby but on the other side of the Prussian-​ Saxon border. The two universities would be merged in 1817, and exist today as the Martin Luther University of Halle-​Wittenberg. The University of Halle was from its foundation particularly valuable for the Prussian state in its training of civil servants in the emerging cameralist system of eighteenth-​century Germany.147 In large part for this reason, 144 On the influence of Pietism on Kant’s conception of Enlightenment, see Ursula Goldenbaum, Appell an das Publikum. Die öffentliche Debatte in der deutschen Aufklärung, 1687–​ 1796, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004. 145 For an account of the central role of Halle in these areas, see Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 146 See in particular Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 147 On cameralism and Polizeiwissenschaft, see Andre Wakefield, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. The first chair in cameralia oeconomica was founded at the University of Halle in 1727.

Introduction  53 special importance was placed on the law faculty there, which was originally centered around its star law professor, Christian Thomasius. The Prussian state saw in Halle the chance to build up and promote an alternative to training in Wittenberg, which was a stronghold of Lutheran orthodoxy. At Halle by contrast the ambition was to create a somewhat supra-​confessional institution. Nonetheless, the statutes of the University of Halle gave the theological faculty there an official role in policing, and sometimes in punishing, what was said throughout all the faculties—​which they exercised notoriously in the case of Christian Wolff. At Wittenberg the members of the theological faculty saw their role as defending the heritage of Luther and Melanchthon against “fanatics,” on the one hand (a label that could easily be applied to any Pietist opponent), and “atheists” on the other, not to mention the Catholics and members of the Reformed church. It is difficult to summarize the core doctrines of Pietism, as laid out by Philipp Jakob Spener in his Pia desideria of 1675, but at its core is the Lutheran understanding of religion as involving individual spiritual rebirth. Spener also emphasized the importance of humility in seeking to persuade others to convert, and in contrast with Luther he did not consider the conversion of the Jews and the fall of the Catholic church to be theologically necessary. In 1695 August Hermann Francke transformed Halle into the main center of Pietism with the foundation of the Halle Orphanage, just one year after the foundation of the university. While it was in its original conception primarily a school for children who had lost their parents or been abandoned, the Halle Orphanage came to be a significant motor of scientific research in its own right, and was deeply institutionally intertwined with the university.148 Francke’s orphanage was the model for the numerous Frankesche Stiftungen that would soon radiate out into Eastern Europe and Asia. As Han Vermeulen relates, Francke soon sent members of his Halle-​based network to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Astrakhan. With the support of King Frederik IV of Denmark and Norway, the so-​called Danish-​Halle Mission extended throughout South Asia as well by the 1730s.149 It was the model of the Pietist missions that gave G. W. Leibniz hope of someday seeing a global Protestant network to rival that of the Jesuits, both in converting non-​Europeans to their faith, as well as in bringing 148 See Kelly Joan Whitmer, The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community:  Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 149 Vermeulen, Before Boas, 106.

54  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations back valuable cultural and scientific knowledge through the sort of deep participant-​observation that the Jesuits had innovated. Another Pietist influence on Leibniz was Carl Hildebrand von Canstein, who in 1711 founded the Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt, dedicated to publishing Bibles in as many languages as possible—​a project that, while focused on converting others, also required first learning as many languages as possible, or at least communicating with and relying on native speakers of as many languages as possible. It was this same Canstein who would serve as the mediator for the long and bitter correspondence between Leibniz and Stahl in 1708–​1710.150 Although Stahl is closely associated with Halle Pietism, Canstein, based in Berlin, was plainly seen as sufficiently neutral to mediate the correspondence fairly. In 1723 Francke, along with the Halle Pietist Joachim Lange, was instrumental in driving Christian Wolff from his professorship at Halle, following the latter’s oration on the practical philosophy of the Chinese. This speech indeed has much in common with Leibniz’s 1714 Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese. It is true that Wolff was a broadly Leibnizian thinker, and that both were associated with the early Enlightenment; and it is also true that Wolff was persecuted by at least some Halle Pietists. But there seems to be very little evidence that Halle divided into two distinct camps, the Wolffians and the Pietists, with the former representing Enlightenment and the latter representing something more retrograde or conservative. In fact, there was no cohesive Leibnizian-​Wolffian program, either before or after Wolff ’s expulsion from Halle, nor on the other side was there any strictly defined doctrine of Pietism that had easily identifiable adherents. Stahl, for example, is in many respects attuned to Pietist thought, but it is difficult to find very many doctrinal points that he had in common with, say, Spener or even his fellow Halle professor Lange. Leibniz, for his part, admired and collaborated with the Pietists in their global, proto-​ethnographic endeavors, which in turn are more cosmopolitan than conservative. Johann Andreas Fabricius, Amo’s friend and likely his roommate during the latter’s period in Jena, provides yet another example of someone who was both involved in Pietist circles, and who published works of a plainly Wolffian and rationalist orientation. In sum, these were not so much two well-​defined and eternally opposed camps as they were broad and often overlapping tendencies. 150 For a thorough account of the context and modalities of this correspondence, see the Introduction to François Duchesneau and Justin E.  H. Smith (eds. and trans.), The Leibniz-​Stahl Controversy, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

Introduction  55 The most important point of contact between Leibnizian-​Wolffianism and Pietism, in fact, which makes both tendencies expressions of an early Enlightenment ethos, is their outward-​looking and global scope. It is this openneess and rejection of parochialism that motivated the work of Johann Heinrich Michaelis at Halle, who in 1701 published a Latin translation and philological commentary on a text in Amharic: research that likely would have been known and admired by Amo’s patron at Wolfenbüttel, the admirer of Ethiopian civilisation and history, Duke Anton Ulrich.151 In 1699 Michaelis took up the chair in Greek and Oriental languages that Francke had left when he became professor of theology, evidently with Francke’s own approval for this replacement. Michaelis would be taught Arabic by the Syrian Solomon Negri, already discussed, who was likely drawn to Halle as a result of its burgeoning strength in what we might call “Semitic studies,” but could be described in a way that is more faithful to actors’ categories as “Orientalism.” Negri soon moved from Halle to Frankfurt, where he studied with the great Orientalist and Ethiopianist Hiob Ludolf, who in turn had a years-​long correspondence with Leibniz on questions of comparative and theoretical linguistics. It was a small world, and while there were indeed antagonisms—​ between Lange and Wolff, or, in the medical faculty, between Stahl and the micromechanist Friedrich Hoffmann—​these seem to have played out principally between individuals, rather than between clearly defined rival groups. And this was a world of individuals all united at least by an openness to the non-​European world—​usually for missionary reasons, in the first instance, though with these often contributing to a broader ethnographic and linguistic interest—​into which Amo may have fit very well. Amo was called a “Wolffian,” but we see no general pattern of side-​taking in his writing, and no evidence that the enemy of a friend, or of a superior or an intellectual predecessor, was necessarily his own enemy. There is no evidence that Pietism would have encouraged exclusionary attitudes toward foreign students at Halle, and indeed the original emphasis in Spener on humility and love would demand just the opposite of such attitudes. The first woman to obtain a medical degree in Germany, Dorothea Erxleben, had studied under Stahl, and was influenced by the Pietistic elements of his work to argue, in a 1742 treatise, for the right of women to study at 151 Johann Heinrich Michaelis, Nova versio latina Psalterii Aethiopici, cum notis philologicis, Halle, 1701.

56  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations university, and indeed for the equality of all human beings regardless of their bodily condition.152 Stahl in particular is a complicated thinker, difficult to classify, and though he is often associated with Pietism,153 as indeed by Erxleben herself, his focus on medical questions, and in particular his deep concern to account for the role of the soul in bodily pathologies, give his thinking a rather different character than the moral and theological concerns of Lange and Francke, for example. Stahl was, if we believe Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling’s 1734 portrayal of the intellectual landscape of Halle, at the head of a school of his own, and it was opposed mainly to what was perceived as “mechanism”: The medical men have ranged themselves into two sects these days, if we can speak in such terms. First there are the Mechanists, and second the Stahlians. Of them the former endeavour to maintain that the vital actions in the human body originate and for the most part act in health as in sickness mechanically, and by the use of the body’s physiology. They say even that the medicaments applied act in a mechanical way in the body; and hence that the soul contributes little or nothing to all this. To this, the Stahlians state the opposite view: namely that the human soul is the prime mover in the body, and that the body through its physiological structure is only a mobile instrument; also that the medicaments applied are only stimulants which prompt the soul to motion.154

This passage has been cited by other scholars, including Brentjes, attempting to understand the intellectual background out of which Amo emerges. It is indeed very revealing, but the explanatory notes Gundling provides, which Brentjes does not cite, are perhaps more so. He observes that both sects, the Stahlians and the mechanists, admit of two further varieties: the “excessive” and the “subtle.”155 The subtle thinkers on both sides

152 See Dorothea Christiana Leporin [Erxleben], Gründliche Untersuchung der Ursachen, die das weibliche Geschlecht vom Studiren abhalten, Berlin: Johann Andreas Rüdiger, 1742. 153 For a thorough study of Stahl’s relationship to Pietism, and of his originality as a thinker, see Johanna Geyer-​Kordesch, Pietismus, Medizin und Aufklärung in Preussen im 18. Jahrhundert. Das Leben und Werk Georg Ernst Stahls, Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2000. 154 Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling, Vollständige Historie der Gelahrtheit, oder ausführliche Discourse, so er in verschiedenen Colegiis Literariis, so wohl über seine eigene Positiones, als auch vornehmlich über Tit. Herrn Inspectoris Christophori Augusti Heumanni Conspectum Reipublicae Literariae gehalten, Frankfurt and Leipzig: Verlegts Wolfgang Ludwig Spring, Buchhändler, 1734, vol. 4, 5256–​57. 155 Gundling, Vollständige Historie der Gelahrtheit, 4, fn., 5256–​57.

Introduction  57 refrain from attributing everything that happens in the body either to the bodily structure or to the soul alone. They take a “middle road,” holding both that in a certain respect, the soul concurs, and necessarily the body also contributes a great deal. Among the mechanists the excessive thinkers by contrast wish to hear nothing at all about the soul, while the excessive Stahlians exclude even the concurrence of the mechanical structure in vital actions from their explanations of at least human physiological processes and motions. Gundling says that the more reasonable of the Stahlians would not exclude the mechanical structure of the body from ordinary physiological explanation, though in the case of pathology they are inclined to look to the “passions of the soul” in order to account, for example, for the etiology of fevers—​thus to the very thing Amo’s Impassivity is dedicated to denying. Finally, in the note Gundling remarks that mechanical medicine has its greatest following in Holland, while in Germany the school centers around the work of Hoffmann, “a father of hundreds of reasonable and, for the most part, famous physicians, not only in Germany, but also in other places.”156 One of these physicians, as already discussed, is Amo’s close friend Moses Abraham Wolff, whose medical dissertation was supervised by Hoffmann, and to which Amo himself appended a dedicatory poem. This triangulated encounter shows that Amo and Hoffmann were not only contemporaries at Halle, but indeed that they were part of the same circles and supported the same sort of work among students at Halle—​Wolff, for example, took philosophy courses from Amo alongside his course of medical study with Hoffmann. Hoffmann and Leibniz both published treatises arguing for the causal autonomy of created substances at nearly the same time, and evidently as a result of their attention to a recent controversy on this topic between Günther Christoph Schelhammer and Johann Christoph Sturm. Leibniz’s reflections issued in the famous De ipsa natura (On Nature Itself) of 1698, while the young Halle physician and mechanist’s view was developed in his 1699 work, the Dissertatio inauguralis physico-​medica de natura morborum medicatrice mechanica (Inaugural Physico-​Medical Dissertation on the Mechanical Nature of Illnesses). Thus from early on, Leibniz and Hoffmann agree, to cite François Duchesneau, that the mechanical structure is “the deep source of causal determinations in organic bodies, as well as the requisite without which one could not imagine the unfolding of the vital functions within a natural,

156 Gundling, Vollständige Historie der Gelahrtheit, 4, fn., 5256–​57.

58  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations complex mechanism.”157 Leibniz expresses broad agreement with Hoffmann in a letter of September 17, 1699, but also presses Hoffmann to discern whether he might agree that there are metaphysical principles, monads, that in the end may be said to ground the mechanism of the body. This question goes far beyond the scope of Hoffmann’s concerns, but it perhaps helps to define Leibniz’s role, or indeed his absence, in physiological and medical debates in Halle, Wittenberg, and elsewhere, throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. He was indeed known, and his name was broadly associated with the anti-​Stahlian camp. But a figure such as Hoffmann, or indeed Amo, would nonetheless likely not consider it necessary to invoke the name of Leibniz in order to establish his own position against the broadly Stahlian view of the mind-​body relation. This is because Leibniz’s own concerns, already dating back to his interaction with Hoffmann, went well beyond what the physiologists saw as their purview to discuss. Leibniz defended the broadly mechanical account of the functioning of the living body, and saw it as crucial to argue that all vital functions can be accounted for in terms of the structure of the animal body alone. But he went well beyond this point of agreement with Hoffmann and others by arguing that the structure must be understood as a literally infinitely complex system of natural machines within natural machines, without end, and that this infinite structure in turn be seen as the bodily or phenomenal result of the perceptual activity of immaterial monads.158 The important thing to note here is that well before Leibniz enters into controversy with Stahl, after reading the latter’s 1708 work, the Theoria medica vera, he has already had extensive contact with a Halle physician who was an opponent of Stahl and would later be a supporter of Amo, and he has already more or less expressed support for this anti-​Stahlian’s mechanist program in medicine and physiology. Why does Amo not mention Leibniz, Stahl, or Hoffmann, either in the Impassivity or in the Distinct Idea, if in fact it is his purpose to take up a side in the opposition between these two figures? A first point that needs to be made in response to this difficult question is that while his intellectual ties to Halle appear to have remained strong, from September 1730, Amo would be 157 François Duchesneau, Leibniz: le vivant et l’organisme, Paris: Vrin, 2011, 155. 158 Thus Leibniz writes to Hoffmann in the letter of 1699:  “Optarem jam viros praeclaros in mechanismo naturae explicando paulatim progredi longius & dare operam non quidem ut, more Cartesianorum, omnia statim per saltum ad prima principia, magnitudinem, figuram & motum reducant, quod fieri a nobis nequit, sed ut per gradus revocent composita ad simplicia & principiis propiora” (see Friedrich Hoffmann, Operum omnium physico-​medicorum supplementum primum, Geneva: de Tournes, 1749, vol. I, 50); also cited in Duchesneau, Leibniz: le vivant et l’organisme, 157.

Introduction  59 officially matriculated at the University of Wittenberg, and it is there also that he would eventually defend his own dissertation in April 1734. It is possible that he had been pressured out of Halle by at least a temporary rise in the influence of the conservative faction there, and in this connection it would have been inadvisable to position himself in his dissertation by reference, either positive or negative, to any works published by Halle professors. Of the twelve authors cited in the Impassivity, eight of them are more or less contemporary German thinkers. Of these eight, three are affiliated with the University of Wittenberg, where the dissertation is defended:  Johann Gottfried von Berger, who published his Physiologia medica sive de natura humana (Medical Physiology, or On Human Nature) in Wittenberg in 1702; Christian Vater, who published his Physiologia experimentalis (Experimental Physiology) there in 1712; and Martin Gotthelf Löscher, the author of the 1728 Physica theoretica et experimentalis compendiosa (A Short Theoretical and Experimental Physics), who was also the president of Amo’s dissertation defense. In 1723, Löscher had published a massive work of experimental philosophy, outlining various experiments with air pumps, hydrometers, barometers, and other devices, and extensively citing Hooke, Boyle, Huygens, and other such renowned figures of the new, mechanically oriented applied natural philosophy.159 A further point that needs to be made in response to the question posed earlier, as to why Amo does not explicitly take sides in one of the two camps in Halle identified by Gundling, is that it is not clear that anything he says in his two dissertations commits him to the one side or the other. Although he has been characterized as anti-​Stahlian, and indeed we have so characterized him in earlier publications, the argument of the Impassivity or of the Distinct Idea is not aimed at showing that the soul is entirely separate from the body, while the body itself is a complex mechanical structure. We will summarize the argument of these two works in detail later, but for now it will be sufficient to point out that in fact Amo does explicitly assert, like Stahl, that the soul can influence the body. Amo denies the reverse possibility, and here he plainly parts ways with Stahl, but to the extent that he believes in the possibility of soul-​body influence he is also plainly parting ways with Hoffmann. Hoffmann and Stahl are both, in their occupations and in their theoretical concerns, physicians, and not philosophers, and one of the 159 See Martin Gotthelf Löscher, Academische Arbeit in physischen, chymischen und anatomischen Wissenschaften, Wittenberg: Gerdesiche Witw., 1723.

60  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations major points of mutual incomprehension in the Leibniz-​Stahl controversy was just the same as the one that Duchesneau has highlighted as between Leibniz and Hoffmann: Leibniz, namely, could not get Stahl to understand that what interested him first and foremost was to give an account of the metaphysical underpinning, at the monadic level, of bodily phenomena. Stahl had no patience for thinking about monads. Amo, like Leibniz and unlike Stahl and Hoffmann, is a philosopher above all, and it is a mistake to see his work as principally concerned with problems that engage the attention of the physicians who surround him, even if he is plainly interested in their work. Amo is, in sum, an independent thinker, and while it is no doubt incorrect to attempt to trace his philosophical positions back to African traditional thought, it is no less incorrect to see them as simply following the views of those around him. What makes him an early modern German philosopher is the fact that he takes up the philosophical questions and problems of that particular context, and sees it as his task to work through these in an original way. The questions are picked up from his milieu; the answers he gives are his own.

4.  On Dissertations and Disputations, and Amo’s Two Dissertations 4.1  Early Modern Dissertations and Disputations Amo’s two academic dissertations, which we translate in this volume, belong to a literary genre now alien to us, and understanding what he is doing in these texts depends in part on reconstructing the conventions and purposes of this kind of writing. Even deciding who wrote these two dissertations—​ Amo wrote both of them, but it is often not understood that he wrote the second dissertation, the Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those things that Pertain Either to the Mind Or to our Living and Organic Body —​depends on understanding the rules of the genre. And that in turn depends on understanding the function of this kind of writing, and of the kind of oral performance that it accompanied and simulated, in the academic life of the universities of the time. The genre is “alien” both in the sense that we do not write in it anymore, and in the sense that we don’t usually read this kind of text even when we are studying early modern philosophy. Descartes, for instance, did not write dissertations, and while Kant did—​Kant defended

Introduction  61 a Latin dissertation, the Meditationum quarundam de igne succincta delineatio (A Succinct Delineation of Some Thoughts on Fire, generally shortened to On Fire) nineteen years after Amo defended his Impassivity—​these are not the texts that Kant is famous for, and usually only specialists read them. Indeed, Kant scholars often feel that in these texts Kant is somehow playing, conforming with a wink to academic forms that had outlived their function in expressing philosophical thought, and that his serious work goes elsewhere. Whether or not this is true of Kant, it is not true of Amo, whose philosophical work is very much part of the life of the German universities of his time, and who was trying very hard to pursue an academic career.160 Of course, people still write dissertations in twenty-​first-​century universities, and there is a historical development connecting dissertations in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century universities with dissertations now. But the expectations of dissertations are very different nowadays, and the word “dissertation,” at least in English, is applied to a much narrower range of texts. Currently, at least in the normal use, a dissertation is a book-​length text composed by a student at a university, writing up the results of their research, and submitted for a degree, normally a doctorate; typically, to get the degree, the student has to “defend” the dissertation in an oral examination, 160 There is a substantial and growing literature, overwhelmingly in German, on dissertations and disputations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, going back to Ewald Horn, Die Disputationen und Promotionen an den deutschen Universitäten vornehmlich seit dem 16. Jahrhundert:  mit einem Anhang enthaltend ein Verzeichnis aller ehemaligen und gegenwärtigen deutschen Universitäten, Leipzig:  Harrassowitz, 1893. While Horn’s study remains fundamental, he is not very sympathetic to the texts and practices he describes. More recent landmarks include Gertrud Schubart-​Fikentscher, Untersuchungen zur Autorschaft von Dissertationen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, [East] Berlin: Akademie-​Verlag, 1970; Clemens Müller-​Glauser, Introduction to Joachim Jungius, Disputationes Hamburgenses, ed. Clemens Müller-​ Glauser, Göttingen:  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988; and three collections of essays, Marion Gindhart and Ursula Kundert, eds., Disputatio 1200–​1800: Form, Funktion und Wirkung eines Leitmediums universitärer Wissenskultur, Berlin:  De Gruyter, 2010, R. C. Schwinges, ed., Examen, Titel, Promotionen:  Akademisches und staatliches Qualifikationswesen vom 13. bis zum 21. Jahrhundert, Basel: Schwabe, 2007, and Marion Gindhart, Hanspeter Marti and Robert Seidel, eds., Frühneuzeitliche Disputationen:  Polyvalente Produktionsapparate gelehrten Wissens, Köln-​Weimar-​Wien: Böhlau, 2016. There are also many excellent articles by Hanspeter Marti, who besides contributions to these collections wrote the articles “Disputation” and “Dissertation” in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, available online, and the article “Philosophieunterricht und philosophische Dissertationen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Artisten und Philosophen: Wissenschafts- u ​ nd Wirkungsgeschichte einer Fakultät vom 13. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, ed. R. C. Schwinges, Basel: Schwabe, 1999. There are also many excellent books, in English and French, by Olga Weijers, on the history of disputation practices: she is mainly interested in the medieval universities, but has also written about the early modern period, notably in her survey book In Search of the Truth: A History of Disputation Techniques from Antiquity to Early Modern Times, Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. There is an entertaining and informative broad picture of the development of early modern universities, with interesting details including on dissertations and disputations, in William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

62  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations answering questions and challenges to their work, but the defense is more or less pro forma (one function is to ensure that the dissertation is really the student’s own work), and the important part is the research and writing (and written evaluations by professors before the oral defense). In Amo’s time, dissertations are typically much shorter, even if they are printed as a “book” or pamphlet; the person presenting the dissertation is not necessarily a student; even if they are a student, they are not necessarily submitting the dissertation as part of their work toward a degree; the defense or oral disputation is comparatively more important, and the written dissertation comparatively less important, than they are nowadays; and, most surprisingly, the person defending the dissertation is not always its author, and need not pretend to be. However, on all of these points dissertations in Amo’s time are in transition, moving closer to the modern standard. But despite its many varieties and its development over time, the seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century dissertation is always a written text produced in connection with an oral disputation held as an academic function of a university or similar institution.161 Confusingly, an oral disputation is sometimes loosely referred to as a “dissertation,” and a written dissertation is sometimes loosely referred to as a “disputation” (we will see both of these happening with Amo). This helps to bring out how closely the written texts and the oral performances were connected. The medieval European universities did not have dissertations. But oral disputations of different kinds were a very important part of medieval academic life. In particular, in a university like that of Paris, which was a guild of teachers (magistri, “masters”) in the different faculties (philosophy or “arts,” law, medicine, theology), a student could be accepted into the guild of magistri only after a successful performance in an oral disputation, presided over by a magister, in which he responded to challenges that any magister in his faculty could pose. This sort of disputation as a rite of passage, part of acquiring a new academic status, is ancestral both to early modern disputations for acquiring a degree (“pro gradu”), and to early modern disputations for acquiring a teaching position or a professorial chair (“pro loco” or “pro cathedra”). In a medieval university when you acquire the 161 “Dissertation” is sometimes used in a broader sense, perhaps especially in the seventeenth century, as when the Latin translation of Descartes’s Discourse on the Method was published as Dissertatio de Methodo (in his Specimina Philosophiae, Amsterdam: Elzevir, 1644). But here we will use “dissertation” consistently for academic dissertations, i.e., printed texts connected with academic oral disputations.

Introduction  63 title of magister you simultaneously become a magister actu regens or magister legens, that is, a member of the teaching staff, and indeed you are typically required to teach for a certain period at the university where you got your degree, although you can retain the title of magister of the university for life even when you are no longer a magister actu regens there. (You are not paid by the university for your teaching—​you can instead collect fees from your students—​unless you have an endowed professorial chair:  in that case you are not allowed to charge your students for your teaching. Indeed professorships were established largely as acts of charity so that poor students could study without having to pay fees to a teacher.)162 The medieval universities do not have separate degrees of magister and doctor (although there is often a degree of baccalaureus as a step on the way to magister). Doctor is just an honorific term for magister. The honorific “doctor” is often reserved for masters in the “higher faculties,” law and medicine and theology, where typically you must first be a magister of arts/​philosophy to become a student in the higher faculty. Thus there can be a career progression from master of arts/​philosophy to doctor in a higher faculty, but there is no progression from master of arts/​philosophy to doctor of arts/​ philosophy. The “higher” faculties tend to think of the arts faculty as a mere means to higher studies, and there were many people who made this progression, but there were always also people who spent their whole career as masters of arts, like John Buridan in fourteenth-​century Paris, and they often resented the other faculties’ claims of superiority and their monopoly on the title “doctor.” By Amo’s time the arts/​philosophy faculties are starting to find ways to contest this subordinate status. To understand the kinds of disputations that were practiced in the medieval universities and still in Amo’s time—​including the disputations that were part of getting a degree—​we need to distinguish between two basic kinds of disputations, sometimes distinguished in Amo’s time as the “ancient” and the “modern” rule. Disputations according to the “ancient” rule are the dialectical exchanges described in Aristotle’s Topics and On Sophistical Refutations, and exemplified by Plato’s Socratic dialogues, where a “respondent” maintains a thesis (either because he believes it, or merely as an exercise), and an “opponent” tries, by means of a series of yes-​or-​no questions, to force him to

162 In eighteenth-​century Germany professors were generally allowed however to supplement their salaries by charging for “private collegia,” lessons offered over and above the teaching duties that go with their professorial chair.

64  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations contradict himself or to admit the contradictory of his thesis. Such “ancient” disputations are practiced in the medieval universities in the so-​called “game of obligations,” and shortly before Amo’s time Christian Thomasius had tried to revive them at the University of Halle, but they remain highly exceptional. The disputations that, together with lectures, were the bread-​and-​butter of academic life, were disputations according to the “modern” rule, and in particular all disputations serving as examinations for a degree were “modern.” In a “modern” disputation, the opponent (or opponents) do not try to argue from propositions that the respondent concedes, by asking him a series of questions; rather, they simply propose arguments at the beginning, from reason and experience and authoritative texts, against the respondent’s thesis, and then leave him to deal with them. (The “objections” at the beginning of an article of, for instance, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, are a stylized literary representation of this kind of opposing argument.) Where in an “ancient” disputation the respondent does not need to argue for his thesis, but only to avoid contradicting himself when questioned about it, in a “modern” disputation the respondent must give positive arguments for his thesis, as well as showing where the opponents’ arguments go wrong.163 Sometimes there is a separation of roles between the respondent, who gives preliminary arguments for a thesis, and the master who “determines” whether the respondent or the opponents are right (or distinguishes the sense in which the respondent’s thesis is right from the sense in which the opponents’ counter-​ thesis is right), gives decisive arguments, and shows where the arguments on the other side go wrong. But to become a magister you must show, in a disputation, that you are capable of “determining” and resolving the opponents’ objections. When printing was introduced, it became commonplace, and was often required by the statutes of particular universities, to print, before a disputation was held, a list of the theses that the respondent is undertaking to defend. Typically a single printed sheet announces that so-​and-​so as respondent will 163 Olga Weijers, “The Various Kinds of Disputation in the Faculties of Arts, Theology and Law (c. 1200–​1400),” in Disputatio 1200–​1800, ed. Gindhart and Kundert, pp. 21–​31, and Donald Felipe, “Ways of Disputing and Principia in 17th Century German Disputation Handbooks,” ibid., pp. 33–​ 61, give good accounts of the ancient and modern rules. Müller-​Glauser, Introduction to Jungius, Disputationes Hamburgenses, is mistaken in saying that early modern disputations followed the rules of Aristotle’s Topics VIII. On Thomasius’s attempts to revive the ancient rule, besides Felipe’s article, see Hanspeter Marti, “Kommunikationsnormen der Disputation: Die Universität Halle und Christian Thomasius als Paradigmen des Wandels,” in Kultur der Kommunikation: Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter von Leibniz und Lessing, ed. U. J. Schneider, Wiesbaden: Harrasssowitz, 2005, pp. 317–​44.

Introduction  65 defend the following theses, with so-​and-​so presiding (praeses), at thus-​and-​ such a place and time; it may also name the official opponents (although others may also have the opportunity to raise questions or objections). So the announcement serves as an invitation (like the poster or flyer for an academic lecture or conference nowadays), and by listing the theses it helps those who bring a copy with them to follow the event; it also gives people time to prepare arguments against the theses. If the theses are unusual or paradoxical, this helps to add to the interest of the event, because it adds to the respondent’s challenge. But what the respondent is being evaluated on is the oral performance. There is no implication that the respondent has chosen the theses himself; if he is a student, they may well have been chosen for him by the praeses. The quality you have to exhibit, notably in order to qualify as a teacher, is not originality but the ability to argue for your position and to resolve objections on the spot.164 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it becomes more common to print not just a bare list of theses but also a dissertation, that is, a connected series of arguments for the theses: these are originally short, still printed on a single multiply folded sheet of paper with the announcement of the speakers and the time and place. Dissertations are a sign of the impact of printing, and the gradually increasing importance of writing as opposed to oral performance in the universities. Increasingly in the eighteenth century the view is that you should be evaluated more on whether you have good arguments for your theses than on whether you can think fast on your feet when your theses are challenged. If you had good arguments to begin with, then you should be able to defend them when challenged; and in order to test the arguments, the opponents should know not just your theses but also your arguments before the event—​so they should be able to examine a printed version of the arguments beforehand to see whether they can find weak points. (Sometimes the arguments are given in syllogistic or quasi-​geometrical form, with marked definitions and assumptions and so on, sometimes more loosely in less regimented prose.) Different universities, and different faculties (philosophy, law, etc.) of different universities, have statutes regulating the conduct of disputations, and often requiring printed dissertations, especially in disputations pro gradu (for a degree) and pro loco (for a teaching position or for a professorial chair). But printed versions of the arguments used in 164 Amo at the end of his Tractatus, Special Part, Section IV, Chapter III, discusses the “art of disputation”; within this chapter, Members II-​V discuss the duties of the different parties in a disputation.

66  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations a disputation, printed sometimes before the event as an invitation, sometimes after the event as a permanent record, are common in other kinds of disputations too. A printed version of a disputation in which a student was respondent can serve to certify to his parents or patron—​whoever has been paying his bills—​that their money has been well spent, that he has devoted himself to his studies and acquitted himself well. In particular, a “valedictory” disputation, when a student is leaving a university, even when he is leaving without a degree, perhaps to move to a new university or to take some position in state or church, certifies his accomplishments to his new university or employer. The author of the dissertation may be either the respondens or the praeses, or it may be a collaborative effort, with the praeses laying down the main lines and the respondens filling in the details.165 Often, but not always, the title page of the dissertation will say who the author is: thus the title page of Amo’s 1734 Inaugural Philosophical Dissertation On the Impassivity of the Human Mind says that it is “publicly defended by the Author, Anton Wilhelm Amo,” so that the same person has the functions of author and respondens. By contrast, the title page of Kant’s 1770 dissertation pro loco as professor of logic and metaphysics at Königsberg, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World), lists Markus Herz, student of medicine and philosophy, as the respondens, and while the author is not quite explicitly named, it is clear that it is the praeses, Kant, and not the respondens, Herz. As this example shows, the dissertation sometimes serves as a statement of the praeses’s intellectual program: he has trained the respondens to defend his theses and arguments, it is a failure for the praeses as much as for the 165 Horn (Die Disputationen und Promotionen an den deutschen Universitäten vornehmlich seit dem 16. Jahrhundert), Schubart-​Fikentscher (Untersuchungen zur Autorschaft von Dissertationen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung), and Müller-​ Glauser (Introduction to Jungius, Disputationes Hamburgenses), have discussions on the authorship question. Schubart-​ Fikentscher stresses the possibility of joint authorship; she also says that it was more important for the respondens to be the author in disputations pro gradu and pro loco than in mere exercise-​disputations. (Müller-​ Glauser focusses on schools rather than universities, and so tends to stress the cases where disputations are just exercises, rather than seriously maintained theses; this leads him to understate the possibility of originality and the likelihood of respondens-​authorship.) Marti’s article “Von der Präses-​zur Respondentendissertation:  Die Autorschaftsfrage am Beispiel einer frühneuzeitliche Litteraturgattung” (in Examen, ed. Schwinges, Titel, Promotionen, pp. 251–​74) gives an excellent account of the origins of the modern scholarly discussion of early modern dissertations (and the role of Horn in particular), helping to explain why this discussion was so obsessed with the authorship question. The issue first arose from a practical discussion among German academic librarians about which author’s name they should catalogue the books under; for Horn, denying the respondens’s authorship and originality is a way of contrasting the modern German academic practice with its ancestors, and asking what old academic legacies we should now get rid of.

Introduction  67 respondens if the respondens is unable to do so, and if necessary the praeses will himself intervene to rescue the respondens.166 Since the respondens was responsible for getting the dissertation printed (and for paying the printer), the praeses will often take a disputation as an occasion for getting a statement of his ideas (written by himself or by the respondens or both together) printed and circulating, where a professor nowadays might use a journal article or a volume of conference proceedings. But many disputations are just exercises, and do not reveal deep commitments of the praeses or respondens, but only ideas that they are trying out. One common function of a dissertation is to examine the statements of some authority in the field, and show that he contradicts himself: this opens a space for the author of the dissertation to propose a way forward, to suggest which statements of the past authority or authorities should be retained and which should be rejected or modified, and to present his own proposal as the best way to salvage and continue the earlier program.167 Properly speaking a disputation is an oral event and a dissertation is a written text. But in fact both words get used in both senses, and it seems that increasingly often in the era “dissertation” is reserved for (the written versions of) disputations pro gradu or pro loco, so that the written text accompanying a disputation which is not pro gradu or pro loco will be called a “disputation” rather than a “dissertation.”168 Thus the Distinct Idea, for which Amo was praeses and Johannes Theodosius Meiner was respondens, calls itself on its title page a Philosophical Disputation rather than a Philosophical Dissertation, although the formally similar Impassivity calls itself an Inaugural Philosophical Dissertation: the most likely reason for calling the Distinct Idea a “disputation” is that neither Amo nor Meiner was getting a degree or a teaching position on this occasion. (We do not know that Meiner was not getting a degree, but it is not said that he was.) Over the long term, as the written dissertation becomes an increasingly important part of the process by which the respondens is awarded his degree, it comes to be expected that dissertations pro gradu should be written by the respondens rather than by the praeses. The 1809 statutes of the new University of Berlin, which become 166 Amo, Tractatus, Special Part, Section IV, Chapter III, Member V, §1, p. 206, says that the praeses and the defendens (i.e., the respondens) share the duty of defending the thesis—​indeed, that for the purpose of this duty they are considered as a single persona! 167 See Müller-​ Glauser, Introduction to Jungius, Disputationes Hamburgenses, pp. xix–​ xxiv, drawing on texts of Jungius. 168 Thus notably Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations (1597) make no pretense to have been performed orally.

68  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations a model for universities elsewhere in Germany, require the degree candidate to attest that he is the sole author of the dissertation. But in Wittenberg in 1734 we are still far from such a rule.

4.2  Amo’s Dissertations: Authorship, Date, Functions With this context in early modern academic disputations and dissertations, we can say some things about the structure and function of Amo’s two Wittenberg dissertations, the Inaugural Philosophical Dissertation On the Impassivity of the Human Mind Or the Absence of Sensation and of the Faculty of Sensing in the Human Mind And their Presence in our Organic and Living Body and the Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those things that Pertain Either to the Mind Or to our Living and Organic Body, and the functions of particular marked parts of these dissertations. We can also briefly say something about the law dissertation on the rights of “Moors” in Europe that Amo is reported to have defended at Halle. But first we should deal with the question of the authorship of the two extant dissertations, as well as some puzzles about the dates, particularly the date of the letter from the rector of the University of Wittenberg appended to the Impassivity. This is important, because the rector’s letter is attesting to something, and what it is attesting to depends on the date, and there is a problem about the date, which has often been overlooked. As we have said, we think that Amo is the author of both the Impassivity and the Distinct Idea. Amo scholars have generally assumed that he was the author of the Impassivity, but have been reluctant to attribute the Distinct Idea to him, and so have very often abstained from using it in reconstructing Amo’s thought. This reluctance probably often stems from an anachronistic assumption that a dissertation is by the respondens who defends it, so that the Distinct Idea would be by Meiner, which as we will see is certainly wrong. A priori, the Impassivity might be by the praeses Martin Gotthelf Löscher or by the respondens Amo or by both in collaboration, and the Distinct Idea might be by the praeses Amo or by the respondens Meiner or both: so Amo might be the author of both dissertations or of neither, with plenty of possibilities in between. But what the texts themselves say about the authorship, which we have no reason to doubt, all points univocally to Amo being the sole author of both dissertations. (He was not the author of everything that was printed in the dissertation booklets: the Impassivity, as a printed booklet,

Introduction  69 includes an address by Löscher to Amo, and the rector’s letter attesting to Amo’s accomplishments.) The title page of the Impassivity says explicitly that it “is publicly defended by the Author, Anton Wilhelm Amo”: so it says that Amo is the author as well as the respondens. Furthermore, Löscher in his address to Amo, after saluting Amo as the “author of this dissertation,” says that Amo in his previous work has proved the fertility of his natural aptitude and its “solidity and elegance of education and learning,” and has “outstandingly proved it again with the present dissertation,” so that “I [Löscher] return it to you [Amo] complete and entirely unchanged, elegantly and learnedly composed by your own forces, so that the power of your natural aptitude [ingenium] will shine forth from it all the more.” This undoubtedly contains elements of conventional flattery, and we need not take everything at full face value, but when Löscher says that he will return the dissertation to Amo “complete and entirely unchanged,” this is not at all an automatic thing to say. This becomes particularly clear if we try to find a parallel in the Distinct Idea. The title page says that Meiner will defend it, but (by contrast with the title page of the Impassivity) it says nothing about who the author is: the silence implies that Meiner is at least not the sole author. And if we turn to the end of the Distinct Idea, where Amo as praeses has an address to Meiner praising him in the second person, corresponding to Löscher’s address to Amo in the Impassivity, we find Amo mainly praising Meiner’s family and especially his father: Amo says nothing about Meiner having written the dissertation, much less about Amo leaving Meiner’s work unchanged. Löscher’s comment on Amo’s writing seems to imply that, even where the student writes the dissertation, Löscher has the right to correct it before publication, and indeed that he would normally do so, but is making an exception in Amo’s case, because, even if Löscher could have improved this or that detail, it is better to let Amo’s ingenium shine through unmixed. The references back and forth between the Impassivity (which Löscher tells us is by Amo), the Distinct Idea, and what Amo calls his Logic, published in Halle in 1738 as the Treatise on the Art of Soberly and Accurately Philosophizing (which we cite as Tractatus, and which is unquestionably by Amo), show that Amo regards all three texts as his, and as steps in the execution of a single philosophical program. Impassivity, Chapter I, Member 2, §1, Note 1, speaking about what can be attributed to a sensation when it is considered either “logically” or “physically,” says that we will explain “about [these] matters in our Logic,” as indeed he does in the Tractatus, General Part, Chapter IV. This shows that already in 1734 Amo had some version of

70  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations the Tractatus, but was waiting for an appropriate occasion (the patron, the students who would use it in their classes) to publish it. The Tractatus also repeatedly refers back, not only to the Impassivity,169 but also to the Distinct Idea,170 calling the former “our dissertation” and the latter either “our disputation” or “our dissertation,” without the slightest hint of a difference in authorship. And, most strikingly, the Distinct Idea itself, Chapter 1, the Note before Member 1; Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note; Chapter 2, Member 1, Note; and Chapter 2, Member 2, §3, all refer back to “our [resp. our inaugural, our whole] dissertation On the Impassivity of the Human Mind.”171 Amo speaks in the first person in all three texts, and the plural “our” is merely the authorial “we” (the Tractatus is unquestionably a single-​authored text). There seems to be no reason to doubt that all three texts are straightforwardly by Amo, and the backward and forward references show that they are all presenting different parts of a single philosophical program. It seems likely that in 1734 Amo, having for professional reasons to conduct two disputations (one as respondens and one as praeses), produced dissertations for the two events by excerpting and adapting material that he had already collected for his Logic. The two dissertations concentrate on controversial, even paradoxical-​sounding theses, try to give rigorous proofs of their theses from explicitly stated principles, explicitly review the “state of the controversy,” and state the opinions of earlier authorities (whether to criticize them, to cite them in support, or to show that the authority contradicts himself and is on both sides of the issue). By contrast, the Tractatus is a systematic textbook, and so must cover topics on which Amo has nothing particularly new 169 Tractatus, Special Part, Section II, Chapter II, Question VI, Note I, p.  101, refers back to Impassivity, Chapter I, Member 1, §1 (“our dissertation on the impassivity of the human mind, Chapter 1, §1, p. 5”); Tractatus, General Part, Chapter I, §7, Note, p. 4, refers back to Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note 2 (“our dissertation on the impassivity of the human mind, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note 2”); and Tractatus, Special Part, Section I, Chapter II, Member I, §2, under heading II, p. 70, refers back to Impassivity, Chapter 2, Sole Member (“our dissertation on the impassivity of the human mind, Chapter II, Sole Member, p. 15”). 170 Tractatus, General Part, Chapter I, §7, Note II, p. 5 refers back to the Distinct Idea, Chapter I, Member 2, Section 2 (“our Disputation establishing a distinct Idea of those things which pertain either to the mind or to our living and organic body, Chapter I, Section II, on the will, §1 with the following [paragraphs]”); Tractatus, Special Part, Section I, Chapter I, Member II, §5, p. 59 refers back to the Distinct Idea, Chapter 2, Member 2, §1 and §3 (“our Dissertation [NB not ‘disputation’] containing a distinct Idea of those things which pertain either to the mind or to our living and organic body, Chapter 2, Member 2, §1 and §3”); and Tractatus, Special Part, Section I, Chapter V, Member I, §4, Note, p. 87, refers back to the Distinct Idea Chapter 2, Member 2, §6 (“our disputation on the distinct idea of those things which pertain either to the mind or to our living and organic body, Chapter II, Member II, §6”). 171 And Distinct Idea Chapter 2, Member 2, §1 says “in the dissertation On the Impassivity of the Human Mind”: not explicitly “our dissertation,” but evidently that’s understood—​it had been called “ours” just before, in the Note to Member 1.

Introduction  71 to say, as well as topics on which he has original and paradoxical theses, for which he refers back to his dissertations. If the Distinct Idea was not by Meiner, and if Meiner did not need it for a degree, why was it published? There may be reasons in Amo’s career needs rather than Meiner’s. It is striking that Amo presides over Meiner’s disputation only a month after defending his own inaugural dissertation and becoming magister legens at Wittenberg, and that as far as we know he never again presided over another disputation, although he taught in German universities (Wittenberg and then Halle and then Jena) for another decade. Perhaps Amo needed to preside over a dissertation in order to complete his transformation into a magister legens: he is now ceremonially doing one of the crucial things that his new status qualifies him to do. He may also simply have had more dissertation-​like material that he wanted to publish, and to get a live audience for, now that he could do so. But there may also have been reasons specific to Meiner. Meiner is described on the title page as “Student of Philosophy and of both Laws,” and from Amo’s address to Meiner there is no suggestion that he is headed for an academic career: he is surely going to be a lawyer, perhaps some sort of state functionary. Amo does tell Meiner to “proceed . . . as you have done up to now, to pursue your learned work with zeal,” so Meiner has more studies in front of him, but perhaps these are legal rather than philosophical studies. Perhaps the disputation and the printed dissertation serve as a testimonial to a law faculty or to a future employer (e.g., a ruling family) that Meiner has succeeded in his philosophical studies and now has a sufficient foundation to turn to more practical matters. The flattery of Meiner’s father also strongly suggests that he, the elder Meiner, is an important target audience: Meiner’s father has presumably been paying Meiner’s bills at Wittenberg, as the Duke of Braunschweig-​Lüneburg had been paying Amo’s, and both will want to see documentation that their money has not been wasted. We may compare here Amo’s legal disputation at Halle on the rights of “Moors” in Europe. Our evidence here is slender, and we can say little with certainty, but we have some plausible comparisons for thinking about the disputation at Halle, which can at least warn us against some excessive constructions that have been placed on this event. We have only one independent witness for this disputation, a paragraph in the Wöchentliche Hallische Frage-​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten for Monday, November 28, 1729 (reprinted in Brentjes pp. 5–​6), saying that Amo had been studying at Halle for some years at the expense of the Duke, and that he had done so

72  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations well in his studies (Latin and law are specified) that he was thought ready to give a public disputation (presumably in Latin). Amo was respondens and Johann Peter von Ludewig, the long-​serving chancellor of the University of Halle and one of the dedicatees of Amo’s Tractatus in 1738, was praeses. (For the chancellor to preside himself over a student’s disputation seems like an extraordinary gesture, showing the Duke that his ward is being well cared for; we are specifically told that the chancellor and the Duke both gave their consent for the disputation.) Von Ludewig was the founder and editor of the Wöchentliche Hallische Frage-​und Anzeigungs-​Nachrichten and probably wrote the report on the disputation himself. We have already cited the core of the report: “So that the argument of the disputation should be appropriate to his situation, the topic De iure Maurorum in Europa, or the law of Moors, was chosen. Therein it was not only shown from laws and from history, that the kings of the Moors were enfeoffed by the Roman Emperor, and that every one of them had to obtain a royal patent from him, which Justinian also issued, but it was also investigated how far the freedom or servitude of Moors bought by Christians in Europe extends, according to the laws in use.” Amo did not choose the topic, as we saw earlier, although he may have chosen the theses he would defend on the topic. It is plausible that he argued that the modern European enslavement of Africans was unlawful (or perhaps unlawful specifically within the Holy Roman Empire, which pretended to constitutional continuity with ancient Rome, and where legal status was often negotiated by claiming imperial charters, the more ancient the better), but we simply do not know: the cited passage is the only evidence we have. The modern scholarship often speaks of a lost “dissertation” by Amo, here following two other sources, Johann Christoph von Dreyhaupt’s chapter on the students of the University of Halle in his Beschreibung des Saal-​ Kreyses,172 and the biographical entry on Amo in Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Großes Universallexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste.173 But Zedler is just citing Dreyhaupt and Gottfried Ludovici (both of whom are following von Ludewig), and has no independent source for Amo at Halle (and his only source for Amo at Wittenberg is a copy of the Distinct Idea); and Dreyhaupt, in his six lines on Amo, is clearly just summarizing von Ludewig, and replacing “disputation” by “dissertation” with no further source of 172 Johann Christoph von Dreyhaupt, Beschreibung des Saal-​Kreyses, vol. 2, p. 28, quoted in Section 2; reprinted by Brentjes (from a later edition), DAB p. 296. 173 Quoted in Section 2; reprinted by Brentjes, DAB p. 295.

Introduction  73 information.174 What Dreyhaupt is doing is not necessarily illegitimate, since “disputation” and “dissertation” were often used as equivalent, but there is no evidence that there was ever a written version of the dissertation other than von Ludewig’s brief report of it; indeed, when Dreyhaupt says that Amo “publicly held” a dissertation (not that he “defended” it), that suggests that he is thinking of a dissertation as an oral performance, not a written text. Neither von Ludewig nor any other source say that Amo was given a law degree on the basis of this disputation, or that he ever got a law degree at all (Dreyhaupt does say that Amo was promoted to magister in philosophy, and if he knew that Amo had also got a law degree he would have said so): modern scholars often say that Amo took a law degree, but that seems to rest on the anachronistic assumption that all dissertations are pro gradu. Indeed, it is clear that Amo cannot have taken a law degree at Halle in 1729, since on the title page of the Impassivity in 1734 he is called “Master of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts, and Student of both Laws,” and on the title page of the Tractatus, back in Halle in 1738, he is called just “Master of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts.” In his Stammbuch entry of 1746, cited earlier, he calls himself “Magister legens in Philosophy and the Liberal Arts, and Candidate in Law”: this implies that even in 1746 he still did not have a law degree. It also suggests that he may still, even at this late date, have hoped to return to his legal studies, and may have regretted interrupting them. Amo’s disputation in 1729, in any case, was not to earn a degree, but just to attest—​to the Duke, and to the University of Wittenberg if he was already thinking of moving there—​that he had made good progress in his studies. We should also mention here one more purely external question, about the date of the rector’s letter appended to the Impassivity. As we have seen, the printed dissertation-​booklet typically included, besides the announcement of the disputation, the theses to be defended, and the dissertation itself, various kinds of front-​and back-​matter. (But the title page of the Impassivity 174 Von Ludewig says that Amo was “bey dem Herrn Cantzler von Ludewig angegeben, unter dessen praesidio sich mit einer disputation öffentlich hören zu lassen,” and that the theme “de iure Maurorum in Europa” was chosen; Dreyhaupt says that Amo “hat  .  .  .  unter dem Praesidio des Cantzlers von Ludewig publice eine juristische Dissertation de jure Maurorum in Europa gehalten.” A look at the full passages leaves no doubt about what Dreyhaupt was doing. Ludovici says that Amo “hielte . . . eine Disputation, unter dem Vorsitz des Ioh. Petr. von Ludewig, de iure Maurorum in Europa, oder vom Mohren-​Recht”; Zedler has “hielte . . . unter dem Vorsitze des Herrn Kanzlers von Ludwig eine Juristische Dissertation de jure Maurorum in Europa, oder vom Mohrenrecht.” Dreyhaupt, writing local history, is following his local source von Ludewig, not Ludovici’s universal history (his “publice” translates von Ludewig’s “öffentlich,” and is not in Ludovici); Zedler is, as he explicitly tells us, combining Ludovici and Dreyhaupt. See our discussion of these sources in Section 2.

74  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations gives the place and the month but not the date or time of the disputation, and the title page of the Distinct Idea gives the place and date but not the time, which means that they cannot have functioned as invitations, and suggests that they were printed after the event.)175 The Impassivity and the Distinct Idea, both relatively unadorned by eighteenth-​century standards, include laudatory addresses from the praeses to the respondens, and the Impassivity also includes, after the dissertation and before Löscher’s address to Amo, a letter “To the benevolent reader” (something close to “To whom it may concern”) from the Rector and Council of the University of Wittenberg, “written publicly and protected with the stamped seal of the University, May 24, 1733” by “Johann Gottfried Kraus, current Rector of the University.” In the printed text there is a circle and inside it the letters “L.S.” = “loco sigilli,” “in place of a seal”: presumably there was a handwritten copy of the letter with an actual wax seal, and the printed copies of the book refer us back to that original. The original letter with the wax seal was not part of a book, but a document in its own right. But when was that letter written? Something seems to be wrong: the disputation (according to the title page) was in April 1734, Löscher’s address is also dated April 1734, but Kraus’s letter, printed in between them, is dated May 1733. There is a temptation to emend the date of Kraus’s letter to May 1734; we can imagine Amo’s dissertation working its way up the chain from the immediately presiding professor to the rector of the university, with each level recording its approval in turn. But then it would be very strange that Kraus’s letter, an extended rhetorical display, was not printed last, after Löscher’s warm but brief address which would have been written the month before; and Johann Gottfried Kraus was rector of the University of Wittenberg in 175 The title-​pages of both the Impassivity and the Distinct Idea use an ambiguous verb, “defendit” (Impassivity “pvblice defendit avctor Antonvs Gvilielmvs Amo,” Distinct Idea “defendit ioannes theodosivs meiner”), which could be either present tense, “Amo, resp. Meiner, is defending” or perfect tense “Amo, resp. Meiner has defended.” In both cases in our translations we have taken the verb as perfect, because the dissertation seems to be referring back to a past disputation rather than looking forward to a disputation to come, since if it were forward-​looking it would probably have announced the date and time. By contrast, for instance, the title-​page of the dissertation written and defended by Johannes Paulus Ramus, De natura sensuum exteriorum hominis in genere, praecipue qua ea quae ad recentiorem de illa philosophia pertinent, presided over by Löscher, says explicitly that the disputation is “habenda,” “to be held,” on April 9, 1726 (but it too does not specify the time, only the date and place). The Wittenberg dissertation De corporis humani palingenesia, presided over by Esdras Henricus Edzardus and defended by Samuel Gottfried Martini on October 10, 1722, uses a future tense (“disseret”) and specifies the place and time (“morning”) as well as the date. There are many other possibilities, some with the dissertation evidently printed before the disputation takes place, others where it is apparently printed afterward. It was perfectly possible to say “defendet” (“will defend”), but the Impassivity and Distinct Idea do not.

Introduction  75 summer 1733 but not in 1734.176 Alternatively, if we were desperate enough, we could assume that the April 1734 for the month of the disputation on the cover page was a typo for April 1733: we would then have to suppose that the rector wrote his letter a month after the disputation, and that it then took Amo’s immediate supervisor another eleven months to add his paragraph. But none of these assumptions is necessary. Kraus’s letter was not originally part of this book, it makes no clear reference to the Impassivity, and there seems no reason why it could not have been written in May 1733, a year before the disputation, and then included (minus the seal) in the printed book coming out of the disputation. It can be difficult to see through the fog of Kraus’s rhetoric what particular events he is referring to. The crucial passage says: After having demonstrated his aptitude for learning, he was brought to Halle in Saxony, from whence, having been educated in diverse disciplines, he came to us, where by ceaseless diligence in his studies he so won over the whole order of the wise that by the votes of all the senators he was adorned with the laurel in Philosophy. This honour [i.e., the degree], born of the merits of his natural aptitude, of his outstanding integrity, industry, and the erudition which he displayed in both public and private exercises, he augmented with praise. Conducting himself in this way, he found favor among the best and most learned, and easily shone out from among his peers. Wherefore, cultivated and summoned by their studies, he taught philosophy at home to many of them, and having examined the views of the ancients as well as of the moderns, he selected the best among [these views], and plainly and lucidly interpreted those that he had selected. In so doing, he showed as much aptitude for learning as for teaching, nor did he show himself unsuited for exercising at some time the office of teaching in the [or an] Academy, toward which he is carried by a kind of natural impulse. Thus, since he has fulfilled our hopes, there was no reason why we 176 Although, to make life more confusing, while Johann Gottfried Kraus or Krause, professor of law, was rector of the university in summer (or “Easter”) semester, 1733, Johann Gottlieb Kraus or Krause, professor of history, was rector of the university in summer semester, 1734. Perhaps you could imagine a story on which the letter had originally said Gottlieb and 1734, the 1734 was backdated to 1733 to avoid the oddity of the sequence with Löscher, and then Gottlieb was corrected into Gottfried; but this is wildly unlikely, and, as we will see, unnecessary. For a list of rectors of the University of Wittenberg, see Album Academiae Vitebergensis, Jüngere Reihe, Teil 3, 1710–​1812, ed. Fritz Juntke, Halle: Niemeyer, 1966, pp. 773–​77, with the two Krauses on p. 774. (Currently German Wikipedia has the list online at https://​de.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Liste_​der_​Rektoren_​der_​Universität_​ Wittenberg.)

76  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations should deprive him of the public testimony of our judgment which he has requested.

It is clear that Amo has already received a degree in philosophy (the “laurel,” and a few lines earlier he was called “master of wisdom and the liberal arts”). But this need not be a degree awarded in April 1734, since we know that Amo had already been declared philosophiae magister at Wittenberg in October 1730.177 And Kraus seems to describe a fair number of things that Amo has done since taking the degree: he has been privately teaching his peers, based on his own philosophical views (having selected the best views on different philosophical questions from among the ancients and moderns and given them his own interpretation), but he does not yet have an official teaching position (“exercising at some time the office of teaching in the Academy”), although he hopes to. Amo was appointed magister legens in philosophy at Wittenberg on April 17, 1734,178 so Kraus cannot have written this in May 1734. It makes more sense for Kraus to be writing in May 1733, retrospectively describing Amo’s degree of October 1730 and the work he has been doing since then. Evidently the magister degree that Amo got in 1730 was not a sufficient condition for his becoming magister legens at Wittenberg. Perhaps we should think of the disputation of April 1734 as a disputation for a higher degree needed to join the official teaching staff, something like a doctorate going beyond the master’s degree of October 1730. But our sources do not speak of such a further degree. It is more accurate to say that Amo’s disputation of April 1734, was not pro gradu but pro loco, for a position as magister legens.179 The dissertation describes itself on its title page as an Inaugural Dissertation, and while that later becomes standard in the German universities to mean a doctoral dissertation, in this case perhaps it is simply inaugurating Amo’s activity as magister legens. But then what is Kraus attesting in 1733? Amo’s degree from three years before? The degree, or appointment to the teaching staff, that he would not get until 1734? But there is no reason to suppose that Kraus’s letter is part of

177 The document is reprinted in Brentjes, DAB, p. 8. 178 The document is reprinted in Brentjes, DAB, p. 35. 179 The title page of the Tractatus, from 1738, lists Amo simply as “Master of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts,” the degree that we know he received in 1730, with no mention of a further degree. If he had received a further degree, such as a doctorate in philosophy, since then, it is very strange that it would not be mentioned. He has also not obtained a degree in law, and no longer presents himself as a candidate for one (though, as we have seen, he will do so in an informal context as late as 1746). As Kraus’s letter says, Amo wanted to be a university teacher, not a lawyer.

Introduction  77 any degree or appointment process—​it only looks as if it were because it got printed in the Impassivity along with other things, a year after it was written. Kraus says that Amo has asked for a “public testimony,” and that, since Amo has been an excellent student and private teacher and everyone thinks well of him, there is no reason not to give him the testimony he has asked for. Kraus concludes his letter by saying: “We have the best of hopes for him, and we deem him worthy of the Princely Grace whom he piously venerates, and whom he praises with every word. In order that he may long continue to enjoy this fortune, and that most ample fruit may follow upon his hope, we pray to God for the health of the best and greatest Prince, LUDWIG RUDOLPH, and for the preservation of the whole House of Braunschweig-​Wolfenbüttel, famed in all of Germany for merits so many and so great.” This was surely meant to be read above all by Duke Ludwig Rudolph, and it is asking him to keep supporting Amo, and implying that Amo will have trouble continuing his studies without the Duke’s continued support: Kraus’s whole letter is a report on Amo’s successful studies at Wittenberg, designed to show the Duke that his money has not been wasted and that he should continue to support Amo, at least until such time as Amo has “an office of teaching in the [or an] Academy” that will make him self-​supporting. Such a letter need not have been written for any particularly dramatic moment such as the awarding of a degree. But, since the letter already existed, Amo or perhaps Löscher decided in 1734 to include it in the printed Impassivity along with other evidence of Amo’s merits and accomplishments.

4.3  Amo’s Dissertations: Their Structure, and the Functions of the Different Parts Before we plunge into the arguments of Amo’s two dissertations, and the issues about his philosophical positions that they raise (issues that can sometimes be clarified by turning to the more systematic exposition in the Tractatus), it is helpful, against the background of the discussion of the dissertation genre, to note some formal features that Amo’s two dissertations share with each other and with many other early modern dissertations. At the most purely formal level, the dissertations are each divided into a number of clearly marked parts, sometimes with sub-​parts (and sub-​sub-​parts), and this marked structure of the dissertation is supposed to contribute to the effect that the text achieves as a whole.

78  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations The Impassivity and the Distinct Idea are each divided into two Chapters. In the Impassivity, Chapter  1 is marked as “Containing Clarifications of the Ideas contained in the Thesis,” and Chapter 2 is marked as “Containing Applications of those things that we have Deduced at length above”; in the Distinct Idea, similarly, Chapter  1 is marked as “Containing Preliminary Matters,” and Chapter  2 as “Containing Applications of what has been Said.” Probably the reason for the difference in the titles of the foundational chapters is just that the Distinct Idea does not have a single grand thesis, as the Impassivity does: in both dissertations Chapter 1 consists mainly of definitions, and explanations of the definitions, of the terms that Chapter 2 will be reasoning about.180 Then each of these Chapters is divided into (no more than three) Members, and in the Distinct Idea Chapter  1, Member 2 is further divided into Sections. In the Distinct Idea, in Chapter  2 (the “Applications”), Member 1 is the “State of the Controversy” and then Member 2 gives Amo’s resolutions of the issues in dispute, on the basis of his clarifications in Chapter  1. The Impassivity’s Chapter  2 is divided in essentially the same way, except that for whatever reason the “State of the Controversy” here is not given the heading “Member,” and the part where Amo resolves the issues in dispute is called the “Sole Member.” Each Member (and each Section of the Distinct Idea Chapter 1, Member 2) is then divided into numbered paragraphs. Amo does not actually use the word “Paragraph,” in the way that he uses “Chapter,” “Member,” and “Section,” but he uses the symbol §, which in many European languages is read automatically as an abbreviation for “Paragraph” (a usage that we retain in English in the restricted context of paragraphs in a lawcode).181 Each paragraph may contain marked parts called “Thesis,” “Proof,” (or “Reason”), very often “Note,” “Notice” (explaining what he means by a title or by some word in the title), “Remark” (these seem to be polemical asides), “Explanation,” “Example,” or “Corollary.” Also, in the Distinct Idea, most of the Members are divided into parts marked by Roman numerals; this is formally independent of the division of the Member into Sections or paragraphs, although the parts marked by Roman numerals often coincide with Sections or paragraphs. Apparently the reason for the double numbering is that Roman numerals mark a 180 However, in the Impassivity, Chapter 1 already contains a series of “Applications”; see discussion in Section 6.1.1.. 181 Amo does speak of “paragraphs” in Tractatus, Special Part, Section IV, Chapter III, Member IV, §7, p. 204, in going through the duties of an arguer in a disputation.

Introduction  79 series of topics that Amo has promised to deal with and is now dealing with, whereas the Sections or paragraphs just break a Member down into bite-​ sized units of thought. At the beginning of the Impassivity there is a kind of table of contents, which gives for each Member of the dissertation a list of main points marked by Roman numerals,182 which serves some of the same functions as the breakdown of the Members of the Distinct Idea into Roman-​ numeral parts; or, conversely, since the Distinct Idea lacks a table of contents, the Roman-​numeral headings within each Member, flagging for the reader the main topics and assertions, serve some of the same functions that a table of contents would serve. How are all these marked parts supposed to help—​how do they contribute to the intended overall effect of the dissertation? Here we need to recall the function of the dissertation in providing arguments for the series of theses that the respondens has undertaken to defend in the disputation. Before there were dissertations, there were printed lists of theses; then dissertations start as appendices to the list of theses, which is given at the beginning. (In some national university systems even now a doctoral dissertation is supposed to be accompanied by a separate sheet of theses, bringing out the new and potentially controversial results of the dissertation.) Neither of Amo’s dissertations exactly follows this model. But the title On the Impassivity of the Human Mind (and, more fully, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind Or the Absence of Sensation and of the Faculty of Sensing in the Human Mind And their Presence in our Organic and Living Body) already makes clear what thesis the respondens is undertaking to defend. And then the table of contents at the beginning of the Impassivity gives Roman-​numeral-​labelled lists, first of the “Clarifications of the Ideas on the part of the Subject of the Thesis” (spirit in general and the human mind in particular), then of the “Clarifications of the Ideas on the part of the Predicate of the Thesis” (sensation and the faculty of sensing, and impassivity as their absence). Then, “with these things explained as a foundation, there follow the state of the question and theses,” and Amo gives a Roman-​numeral-​labelled list of three theses, spelling out point by point the single grand thesis contained in the title (the mind does not sense; it does not have the faculty of sensation; these belong rather to our organic and living body). So the table of contents, besides giving an overview

182 To be precise: Chapter 1, Member 1 is broken down into points I–​III; Chapter 1, Members 2 and 3 together, are broken down into another points I–​III; and then Chapter 2, Sole Member, is broken down into a third series of points I–​III.

80  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations of the argumentative structure of the dissertation, also gives quite specifically a list of the theses to be defended. The Distinct Idea does not give in any one place a list of all the theses it will defend. But the Roman-​numeral-​labelled points in its Chapter 1 correspond roughly to the “Clarifications of the Ideas on the part both of the Subject and of the Predicate of the Thesis” in the Impassivity, and the Roman-​numeral-​labelled points in the Distinct Idea’s Chapter 2 correspond roughly to the “Theses” of the Impassivity. And while the Distinct Idea’s title (A Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those things that Pertain Either to the Mind Or to our Living and Organic Body) does not state a thesis as the Impassivity’s title does, the Distinct Idea does state at least a schematic grand thesis, analogous to the Impassivity’s title, in Chapter  2, Member 1: “Thesis. All things that are effects of the exercise of an intention of the human mind are to be attributed to the mind to the extent that they have their nature from consciousness and from the mind’s premeditated decision; but in so far as they are effects of sensation, of the faculty of sensing and of the natural instinct considered simply in itself, they pertain to our living and organic body.” The Note attached to this Thesis explains that this is said against Jean Le Clerc, who says: “There are seven main faculties of the mind, which it is worthwhile to consider separately: (1) intellect, (2) will, (3) the faculty of sensing, (4) liberty, (5) imagination, (6) memory, (7) the various habits acquired by repeated actions.” So Chapter 2, Member 2, goes through each of these seven in turn, marking each by a Roman numeral, and determining whether it belongs purely to the mind, purely to the body, or to the mind in one respect and to the body in another respect. So, even though this dissertation never gives a formal list of theses (and never states anything it calls a “Thesis” except the one we have just cited), the seven determinations about Le Clerc’s seven alleged mental faculties in Chapter 2, Member 2, function as something like a list of seven theses spelling out point-​by-​point the single grand thesis contained in Chapter 2, Member 1, much as the Impassivity’s three Theses in its Chapter 2, Sole Member, spell out the single grand thesis contained in its title.183 So each dissertation, in its way, conforms to the generic expectation of stating beforehand a list of the theses to be defended—​in both cases a list of theses connected closely enough that they can be stated as a single grand 183 The “State of the Controversy” of the Impassivity also opens with a restatement of the thesis: “Human beings sense material things not with respect to their mind but with respect to their living and organic body.”

Introduction  81 thesis, although it helps to unpack them to show how to argue for each component. Equally important, the formal structure of the dissertation manifests the structure of the argument that is supposed to establish these theses and resolve the controversies about these topics. In both dissertations, Chapter 1 gives conceptual clarifications of the terms involved in the thesis (which can be a fair number of terms when the thesis is fully unpacked), and Chapter 2 first summarizes the “State of the Controversy” or “State of the Question” and then shows how to resolve it by applying the clarifications from Chapter 1.184 Each dissertation thus advertises what can be accomplished by first clarifying our ideas and then reasoning deductively from them (implying that the previous state of disagreement arose from people not clarifying their ideas, or not agreeing with each other on the meanings of the terms, or not having the patience to follow out step by step the implications of these ideas). And, of course, each dissertation advertises the power of its author in writing, and of its respondens (whether the author or not) in oral disputation, to clarify, deduce, and dispel any obscurities or objections. The structure of foundations-​and-​then-​applications is crucial to the enterprise. In both dissertations Chapter  2 is an application of Chapter  1; the theses of the Distinct Idea’s Chapter 2, Member 2, are applications of the grand thesis of Chapter  2, Member 1; and the Impassivity’s Chapter  1, Member 1, §1, includes besides a description of spirit and “Explanations of the Immediately Preceding Description of Spirit” with their proofs, also three “Applications” of Explanation 1. And we can also say that the Distinct Idea as a whole is an application of the Impassivity, which is repeatedly cited to support both the clarifications in Chapter 1 and the arguments for the theses in Chapter 2. The foundations are, ultimately, conceptual clarifications, which can be expressed in definitions. To some extent Amo’s dissertations, and many early modern German philosophical dissertations, carry over from scholasticism the Aristotelian analysis of science as a system of demonstrations, each deduced from definitions and from a very restricted class of other unproved first principles (some existence-​assertions and some topic-​neutral principles presupposed in all reasoning). There is some modern updating when they try to follow a geometrical method, or try to trace the origins of our ideas. 184 Amo in Tractatus, Special Part, Section IV, Chapter III, Member III, says that the praeses has a special responsibility to formulate the state of the controversy (p. 203). More surprisingly, Member IV, §1 instructs the argumentans or opponens, in scrutinizing the thesis, to give definitions or descriptions of the ideas contained in the subject and predicate of the thesis (p. 203), which is something Amo does explicitly in Impassivity Chapter 1. But here in the Tractatus he is talking about the tasks of participants in an oral disputation, not about who writes what part of a written dissertation.

82  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations But we are likely to suspect, as everyone since Kant has suspected, that these dissertations, and the whole philosophical practice that they are part of, exaggerate what can be established by conceptual clarifications and syllogistic or geometric reasoning from these concepts: in Kant’s terms, that analytic judgments can be established this way but synthetic judgments cannot.185 One possible reply is that this kind of dissertation is not really trying to establish anything beyond the reach of controversy, and that if a text could really establish something beyond the reach of controversy there would be no need to have an oral disputation about it in addition. Rather, a dissertation lays out a program, and it stakes out a thesis or a few connected theses, and it shifts the burden of argument onto anyone who wants to contest these theses. The conceptual clarifications attempt to ensure that all the parties to a disputation are using the terms in the same way. The deductions put the burden on the opponent to specify where he disagrees: he must either reject some premise or explain why the argument is invalid, either because of some formal flaw or, e.g., because a term is being used in one way in one premise and in another way in another premise. Likewise if the opponent, in arguing against the thesis (or one of the theses), makes all the steps of his argument explicit, he will put the burden on the respondens either to deny some premise or to explain why the argument is invalid. Another carryover from scholasticism is the citation of authorities. In some disciplines (theology, law) the use of authorities is essential, and there are some authorities (the Bible or the law-​code) which cannot be challenged (or which must be defended when challenged, and the challenge somehow resolved). But in philosophy, even within scholasticism, authority is never supposed to be an ultimate foundation. An appeal to an earlier philosopher (or to one’s own earlier works, as in the Distinct Idea’s appeals to the Impassivity) can serve as a shorthand for the earlier philosopher’s arguments, so that they do not have to be repeated at length each time you want to make a further deduction from them. It can also have the function of raising the cost of disagreement: “if you want to disagree with me, you will also have to disagree with Aristotle [or whomever].” How much of a cost this is depends on who you are citing and on how your audience, or your official opponents, understand their relation to him. Since the authorities that will be accepted 185 Except, for Kant, by the “construction” of concepts in something like a geometrical diagram, which supplies an intuition of something that falls under the concept. But while philosophical arguments may mimic the form of geometrical proofs, they have no such ability to supply intuitive representations.

Introduction  83 by your audience and your opponents are more fragmented in eighteenth-​ century Wittenberg than they were in thirteenth-​or fourteenth-​century Paris, it is harder to achieve the desired effect in this way. There seems to be no place in Amo’s two dissertations where an authority is cited as a self-​ sufficient argument for a conclusion, except in the Impassivity, Chapter 2, Sole Member, Thesis 1, Third Proof, with a quote from the Bible, indeed from Jesus himself as reported by St. Matthew; and even here this is just one of three independent proofs for the same thesis. But certainly there are places where Amo thinks that citing some authority will help win the sympathy of the opponents or the audience, or of Löscher as praeses of the Impassivity—​ that he will in this way deter some objection or, more positively, that he will be able to present himself as carrying out a program that he and his current interlocutors share with the cited authority. This may happen particularly where the authority in question is connected with the University of Wittenberg. Amo three times cites the De Anima of Philipp Melanchthon, the church reformer (Luther’s closest collaborator) but also educational reformer, who was a professor at Wittenberg from 1518, only sixteen years after the founding of the university by Elector Friedrich the Wise of Saxony, until his death in 1560. Friedrich had given Melanchthon near carte blanche to reform the university.186 Once Amo cites a deathbed saying of Friedrich himself, and he twice names Luther in citing his translation of the Bible. And he gives multiple citations from four other Wittenberg professors, Daniel Sennert (1572–​1637, an important figure in the transition from Aristotelianism to the mechanical philosophy), the praeses Martin Löscher, and two teachers of Löscher’s, Christian Vater (1651–​1732) and Johann Gottfried von Berger (1659–​1736): all four were medical doctors interested in the relations between medicine and philosophy. Even apart from these people’s connections with Wittenberg and with the praeses, it is especially appropriate for Amo to cite authorities in medicine and theology, disciplines in which he has no degree himself: he cites expert testimony to show that these disciplines presuppose his side, not the opposite side, of a philosophical debate. In some contexts it might be surprising, or even against the rules, to cite arguments from theology or medicine in a philosophical disputation. But it is plausible here, in part because of the presidency of Löscher, a medical doctor whose father and brother were theology professors 186 On Melanchthon at Wittenberg, and his reforms of the university and curriculum, see Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon.

84  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations at Wittenberg and officials of the Lutheran church, but also because of a broader Wittenberg tradition going back to Melanchthon. As we have seen, Löscher taught both philosophy and medicine; Melanchthon already taught philosophy and theology and Greek. Melanchthon, both as a Lutheran and as a humanist classical scholar, was suspicious of the scholastic philosophy inherited from the medieval universities. He was concerned to reform philosophy teaching at Wittenberg, both by institutional changes and by his own writing and teaching, and he could if he wished have used his authority to try to abolish philosophy teaching there altogether; he did not, because he was convinced that knowledge of philosophy was necessary for a trained theologian or medical doctor. But Melanchthon’s legacy in philosophy at Wittenberg (seen in his De Anima, the work that Amo cites) was a closer cooperation between philosophy and the “higher” disciplines, and a willingness to rethink the traditional Aristotelian teaching of philosophy, keeping the parts that would be of practical use to the “higher” disciplines and pruning or reforming the rest.187 It is natural for Amo to cite this Wittenberg tradition and to try to locate himself within it. Nonetheless, Amo supports his philosophical claims on philosophical foundations, citing works of medical physiology, or the Bible and its interpreters, only for supplemental confirmation. People cite authorities, not only to mark agreement, but also to mark disagreement. A dissertation is supposed to review the “state of the controversy,” and so it needs a controversy. It seems to be standard to say, in stating your thesis, “these things are said and defended against so-​and-​so.” The more important the authority, the more impressive it will be if you can really refute them, but also the more scrutiny you will be under to see if your arguments against them really work. In the “State of the Controversy” of the Distinct Idea (Chapter 2, Member 1), as we have seen, the Cartesian-​Lockean liberal Protestant philosopher-​theologian Jean Le Clerc is selected for target practice: Le Clerc is not the founder of a school to whom anyone would swear allegiance, but a learned scholar who presents the states of the philosophical disciplines post-​Descartes in usefully systematic ways, from a point of view ideologically acceptable to not-​ too-​ conservative German Protestants.188 187 Again see Kusukawa, with discussion of Melanchthon’s De Anima in particular. 188 Jean Le Clerc (1657–​1736), a Francophone Reformed Protestant theologian and philosopher from Geneva, made his career mainly in the Netherlands, within institutions of the Remonstrant church, i.e., of the fraction of the Dutch Reformed church that denied Calvin’s doctrine of predestination and was expelled from the established Reformed church at the synod of Dort in 1618–​1619. Le Clerc was a friend of John Locke, who was close to the Remonstrants during his time in exile in the Netherlands (1683–​1688). Le Clerc wrote manifold scholarly works including works of (generally

Introduction  85 The “State of the Controversy” of the Impassivity is more complicated. There the main targets selected for criticism are Descartes, Sennert, and again Le Clerc—​Le Clerc is still alive (though sick and dying) at the time, and brings the survey of opinions down to the present. But Amo also cites both Descartes and (as we have seen) Sennert positively several times, claiming their support or referring the reader to their discussion, and he also cites Le Clerc this way once: he seems to cite Sennert and Le Clerc especially as precedents for his technical uses of some terms, and for their reports on the views of the ancients. And in the “State of the Controversy” he first cites a passage of Descartes that he disagrees with, and then, in a “Remark,” cites a passage where Descartes “manifestly states the contrary to his own view,” i.e., where Descartes supports Amo’s thesis that the mind does not sense (or that it is not acted on, which according to Amo implies that it does not sense); and then he repeats the same procedure with Sennert, and then again with Le Clerc. Amo also mentions that his thesis is against a passage of the contemporary medical physiologist Georg Coschwitz (a follower of Stahl at Halle), and he also cites Aristotle and two recent German philosophers as “agree[ing] with us,” but he seems much less interested in these people than in Descartes and Sennert and Le Clerc, whom he displays much more prominently and who, he tries to show, are with him as well as against him. (When Amo attributes some thesis to an earlier author, although he usually gives a precise reference and sometimes quotes the passage, his interpretation often depends on making a deduction from what the author literally says with the help of an auxiliary premise which Amo himself accepts but which the author cited may not; it is important to check Amo’s references and to be cautious in accepting his interpretations.) As noted, it was common in early modern dissertations to try to show that some earlier authority contradicted himself, or contradicted some yet earlier authority he was claiming to follow.189 Perhaps the motivation is simply that it is a more virtuoso display of dialectical talent to refute an authority out of his own words than by using premises from elsewhere. But it also allows you to present yourself as carrying out the earlier authority’s program, saying what he really wanted to say, correcting his sometimes liberal) biblical criticism; he and some other Remonstrants were sometimes suspected, rightly or wrongly, of “Socinianism,” i.e., of denying the Trinity. He also wrote systematic philosophical texts, including the Physica and Pneumatologia, which Amo cites in the dissertations, and the Logica, which Amo cites in the Tractatus. Le Clerc uses the discipline-​title Ontologia before Christian Wolff, who is popularly said to have invented it; perhaps Wolff took it from Le Clerc.

189

See Müller-​Glauser, Introduction to Jungius, Disputationes Hamburgenses, pp. xix–​xxiv.

86  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations infelicitous expressions by the standards that he would himself accept. It is a mistake to suppose that, because Amo displays Descartes prominently as a target for refutation, he thinks of his project as generally anti-​Cartesian. Most of Amo’s citations of Descartes are to agree, and he seems to think more highly of Descartes than of any other author except Melanchthon and the Wittenberg medical authors culminating in Löscher. To refute an author in the elaborate way that Amo refutes Descartes, citing his views on both sides and presenting yourself as developing his better thoughts, is in the context of early modern dissertations and disputations a compliment, although naturally it is not the kind of compliment that you would pay to your praeses. Some of the modern authors that Amo cites are now fairly obscure figures,190 although in most cases we can see why he might want to cite them, taking into account their relative prominence at the time as well as Amo’s (and Löscher’s) preference for authors who wrote on body and soul from a medical standpoint or who were associated with Wittenberg or both. (Some puzzles remain, such as his citations from the obscure Edme Didier.) Perhaps more surprising, for a twenty-​first-​century reader used to the current canon of early modern philosophy, are the authors Amo fails to cite. He apparently never cites a single British author in the two dissertations: probably neither Amo nor most of his Wittenberg audience could read English, but that is not in itself a full explanation, since British authors sometimes wrote in Latin, and English books were often translated into French and Latin and sometimes German.191 (In the Distinct Idea, which has much less scholarly apparatus, the only modern authors Amo cites, besides himself, are Melanchthon and Descartes and Le Clerc. Amo did not need to show off in the same way on this occasion, and Löscher was not presiding and did not need to see himself and his teachers cited.) Naturally Hobbes and Spinoza, as religious radicals (“atheists,” as their contemporaries put it), would be dangerous authors to cite, especially if you were going to agree with something they said, but even showing that you had been reading them would be bold, and the books may not have been easy to get. It is more surprising that the dissertations never

190 Amo also cites ancient authors, including of course the Bible, generally citing Greek authors in Latin translation (but he cites the Bible in Greek in the Impassivity, and Epictetus in Greek in his Stammbuch entry). As Kraus says in his letter, Amo, “having examined the views of the ancients as well as of the moderns, selected the best among [these views], and plainly and lucidly interpreted those that he had selected.” Amo regularly cites, besides the Bible, Aristotle, Epictetus, and Cicero; also Seneca, Aulus Gellius, and Augustine. 191 Amo does cite a Latin work of Francis Bacon in Tractatus, Special Part, Section III, Chapter II, Member I, §2, p. 197—​apparently his only citation of a British author.

Introduction  87 mention Malebranche or Leibniz or Wolff. Perhaps it did not seem as obvious to Amo as it would to us that Malebranche is the author you cite for occasionalism; he does once cite the German occasionalist Johann Christoph Sturm.192 Leibniz and Wolff may have been too hot to handle after Wolff ’s expulsion from Halle in 1723, which was reversed only in 1740. It might not have been outrageous at Wittenberg to cite Wolff, as it would be outrageous to cite Spinoza, but citing Leibniz or Wolff with approval might have risked alienating more people than it was worth alienating.193 But there may be something else going on here. Amo in the Impassivity is taking a stand on the issues that were commonly debated between the “three systems” of mind-​body relations, namely “physical influx” and occasionalism and preestablished harmony, as they were laid out especially in Wolff ’s Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt (Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Man, as well as on All Things Universally) of 1720, and then in Latin in his Psychologia Rationalis of 1734, roughly simultaneous with Amo’s dissertation. Wolff would have been the obvious reference point for Amo. We can see Amo drawing things from the debate, for instance using arguments that followers of the other two systems used against physical influx, and his own position certainly has points in common with preestablished harmony 192 “Occasionalist” may not be quite right for Sturm, who presents himself as an eclectic, not a follower of any given school: Sturm is suspicious of anyone who thinks we can do philosophy by deduction from a short list of principles, which would probably include Malebranche. But Sturm is a theological voluntarist who thinks, like Malebranche, that bodies are purely passive, and that the activities usually attributed to them should instead be attributed to God. He would, however, be suspicious of Malebranche’s insistence that God does everything through general volitions. Amo (in Impassivity, Chapter 2, State of the Controversy, near the end) cites Sturm’s Physica electiva sive hypothetica, Nuremberg, 1697. On Sturm’s eclecticism, voluntarism, and openness to experiment, see Thomas Ahnert, “‘Nullius in verba’:  Autorität und Experiment in der Frühen Neuzeit. Das Beispiel Johann Christoph Sturms (1635–​1705),” Zeitsprünge:  Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 7 (2003): 604–​18. 193 See Walter Friedensburg, Geschichte der Universität Wittenberg, Halle: Niemeyer, 1917, p. 555; Andres Straßberger, Johann Christoph Gottsched und die »philosophische« Predigt, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010, pp. 397–​98; and the letter of Wolff to Johann Gustav Reinbeck of September 9, 1739 printed at Anton Friedrich Büsching, Beyträge zu der Lebensgeschichte denkwürdiger Personen, insonderheit gelehrter Männer, Erster Theil, Halle:  Johann Jacob Curts Witwe, 1783, pp. 31–​44, esp. the second and third paragraphs of p. 33, for how controversial Wolff was at Wittenberg, not just at Halle. He was under attack from “superintendents” (Lutheran quasi-​bishops) and influential professors of theology. The Dr. Löscher who Wolff says is demanding in 1739 that the secular arm intervene against the Wolffians is Martin Löscher’s brother Valentin; Martin Löscher had died four years previously. (When Friedensburg says that the Wittenberg theology faculty discussed the question whether a candidate who studies Wolff ’s writings should be forbidden to preach, this is misleading. His only source is Wolff ’s letter to Reinbeck, and all Wolff says is that someone has written to the theology faculty requesting their opinion on the question; Wolff has no further information on how they responded, if they did at all.) Thanks to Paola Rumore for alerting us to the anti-​Wolffians at Wittenberg and starting us on this chain of references.

88  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations and points in common with occasionalism. But it is remarkably difficult to get Amo’s view to line up with any of the three systems. This is probably deliberate on Amo’s part. It looks as if he wanted to think the issues afresh, starting from his “Clarifications” of the concept of spirit in general and of the human mind in particular, and deliberately refused to locate himself on the standard grid, as he could have done for instance by giving a list of which of the theses of each of the three systems he agreed or disagreed with. The result can sometimes be frustrating—​there are questions that we would like Amo to answer, where his views can at best be indirectly inferred. But he seems to have thought that a fresh start was necessary (although not as radically as, for instance, Kant wanted to start afresh fifty years later), and he seems to choose to develop his views more in dialogue with Descartes (and with the Wittenberg authors) than with more recent, perhaps more sophisticated developments. And a written dissertation and oral disputation gave you the opportunity to try out new views, in dialogue with whatever past authorities you thought would be the most useful conversation-​partners.

5.  The Ancient and Modern Debates on Action and Passion and on Sensation Amo develops his theory of sensation, and of the other cognitive and conative acts that depend on sensation, in the context of a broader theory of action and passion. Sensation is (by its very definition, according to Amo) a passion, a kind of being-​acted-​on, and Amo applies to it a theory of action and passion, and in particular of what can or cannot act on what (can bodies act on spirits? can spirits act on bodies? can bodies act on bodies?). While Amo does not spell out his theory of action in as much detail as we would like, so that there are questions of interpretation that will probably remain controversial, he is clearly starting from the modern discussion of the “three systems” (“physical influx,” occasionalism, and preestablished harmony) for explaining the apparent interaction of mind and body, and also from modern discussions of sensation and criticisms of the scholastic theory of “sensible species.” The crucial negative argument of the Impassivity, arguing that a body cannot act on a spirit, and in particular cannot act on it in such a way as to produce sensation, is Amo’s version of a standard argument against “physical influx,” which was sometimes applied particularly against “sensible species” explanations of sense-​perception. But Amo is also aware of ancient

Introduction  89 and medieval debates, going as far back as Aristotle, about the conditions of action and passion and about the explanation of sense-​perception: he cites some of the ancient texts directly, and he is also aware of some of the issues through other sources, notably Sennert, one of the authorities he cites and (in part) criticizes in the Impassivity. A full-​scale discussion of either the ancient or the modern debates is impossible here, but we will quickly review some key points of the ancient debate before turning to aspects of the modern debate that may have been especially important for Amo.

5.1  The Ancient Debate on Action and Passion and on Sense-​Perception Aristotle in On Generation and Corruption I, 6–​10 gives a series of analyses of mixture, action and passion, and contact—​what they are, and the conditions under which each of them comes about. The core is the analysis of action and passion in I, 7–​9. But first Aristotle argues in I, 6 that action and passion presuppose contact, or touching; and he refers back here to his analysis of touching in Physics V, 3, which says that X and Y touch if “their extremities are together,” i.e., if some extremity of X and some extremity of Y are in the same place (Physics V, 3 226b21–​3). In some cases we may want to say that X acts on Y without touching Y, if X is a remote or indirect cause of Y’s being changed, but in these cases X will act on Y through one or more intermediate agents, of which at least the last, the agent that immediately acts on Y, will have to touch Y. Aristotle says that some philosophers have invoked this kind of explanation especially to explain how we can sense-​perceive objects at a distance (most obviously in visual perception), if sensation is a being-​ acted-​on by the object we sense: “some people think that each thing is acted on through certain pores [or “passages”], when the last agent, which is the agent in the strictest sense, enters [through these pores in the body it acts on]; and they say that this is the way that we see and hear, and sense by all the other senses, and also that it is possible to see through air and water and transparent things because they contain pores, which are too small to see but are close-​packed and lined up, and that things that are more transparent have more of these” (Generation and Corruption I, 8 324b25–​32). It was especially Empedocles who posited such pores, to account for action and especially for sensation, but Aristotle means this description to apply also to Democritus. For Empedocles, we see when fire from the visible object is carried through

90  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations channels in the surrounding air to make contact with the fire that emerges through the pores in our eyes; for Democritus, we see when eidôla of the visible object—​thin husk-​like films of connected atoms, which each macroscopic body continuously casts off into the void around it—​pass through the surrounding void, with as little interference as possible from any air-​particles in the way, into our eyes. (So the void would be a kind of giant pore or system of pores.) Aristotle himself refuses to explain sensation by positing something that flows from the sensible object through otherwise empty spaces into our sense-​organs:  rather, he thinks that the sensible object produces a qualitative alteration of the medium between us and the object (so there must be some body there to be altered), and that this alteration is transmitted across the medium until our sense-​organs too are altered. (It is more mysterious and controversial what else Aristotle thinks is necessary, beyond an alteration in the sense-​organs, for the soul-​body composite to be sensing.) This description makes it sound as if Aristotle thinks that the only action is of bodies acting on bodies by direct or indirect contact, since as he says in On Generation and Corruption I, 6 only magnitudes occupying places can be in contact. But Aristotle clearly does not believe that: he thinks, for instance, that an animal’s soul acts on its body and that the unmoved movers of the heavenly spheres act on the heavenly spheres. His requirement that the immediate agent touch the patient creates a difficulty for these cases. In On Generation and Corruption I, 6 he makes the slightly odd suggestion that although, when X acts immediately on Y, X must always touch Y, nonetheless Y need not touch X. His motive here is to allow some indivisible X, like the soul or like the movers of the heavens (which in Physics VIII, 10 he argues must be indivisible), to act on some object Y, and to move Y, although an indivisible X cannot itself be acted on or moved. An indivisible (that is, partless) object cannot be acted on because it cannot be touched, since something can only be touched if it has extremities, and something that does not have parts—​like a point, or like the movers of the heavens—​also does not have extremities.194 But even if we admit that X can touch Y without being touched by Y, and even if this might help us understand how the soul can act on the body in voluntary motion, it does not help us understand what happens in sensation: how 194 Physics VI, 1, building on Physics V, 3, argues that indivisible or partless things, such as points, cannot touch (it does not talk about action and passion, and so does not draw the further consequence that indivisible things cannot be acted on). Physics VI, 4 and VI, 10 give a separate argument that indivisibles cannot be in motion, or cannot be in motion per se (they can be in motion indirectly because they belong to something that is in motion—​e.g., the vertex of a cube or the soul of an animal can be in motion in this way).

Introduction  91 can we have sensation unless the soul is acted on by the object, and how can the soul be acted on unless it is touched, and how can it be touched unless it is a body or anyway some kind of extended magnitude? Aristotle actually suggests in Physics VII, 2–​3 that in sensation the sensible object acts on the sensitive soul through something (some organ of our body) which touches the sensitive soul, thus apparently implying that the sensitive soul is an extended magnitude, but he clearly rejects this suggestion in the De Anima. In the De Anima he says that the soul is unmoved and unaffected (except in the incidental sense that it is in the body and the body is affected and moved—​ and except that the rational soul is apparently acted on by intelligible objects, notably by God, when it cognizes them). So in the De Anima he gives up on the commonsense view that sensation is a passion of the soul. Rather, he says that it is a passion of the soul-​body composite, a “common passion of soul and body” (indeed, he says that most of the things that people usually treat as actions and passions of the soul are really common actions or common passions of soul and body together). But, apparently, Aristotle thinks that the part of the soul-​body composite that is acted on in sensation is exclusively a part of the body, namely the sense-​organ, although the sense-​organ would not be acted on by the sense-​object, or anyway would not be acted on by the sense-​object in the specific way that is required for sensation, if the sense-​ organ did not have a sensitive soul present in it.195 It is perhaps not entirely surprising that this story convinced no one for the next several centuries. The Stoics, in particular, take it for granted that the soul is acted on by the body in sensation, that all action is by contact, and that there is no contact except of bodies with bodies (they either reject, or simply pass over in silence, Aristotle’s suggestion that X can touch Y without Y touching X), and they conclude that the soul is itself a body. They also infer that, since the soul acts on the body in voluntary motion, the soul must itself be a body, and indeed that since God acts on the world, God must himself be a body.196 Indeed, despite the Stoics’ general hostility to the Epicureans, they 195 Different medieval Aristotelians take different views on whether the sensitive soul can be acted on by bodies, and is so acted on in sensation. Many, including Thomas Aquinas, think that the sensitive soul passively receives “sensible species” arising from the sensible bodies, and that this reception is necessary for sensation, whether or not it is sufficient. Daniel Sennert, who may have been Amo’s main gateway into scholastic discussions of sensation, is insistent that sensible species are received only in the bodily sense-​organ, not in the sensitive soul. See discussion of these controversies, in Section 6.1.2. 196 For the Stoics’ restriction of action and passion to bodies, and the inferences that soul and God are bodies, see the texts collected in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, Section 45 (English translation in vol. 1, original texts in vol. 2; more texts on God in Sections 44 and 46, and on the soul in 53). Technically for the Stoics

92  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations find themselves in agreement with the Epicureans on all these conclusions (except that the Epicureans do not believe in a god who acts on the world). Lucretius, following Epicurus, says “nothing except a body can touch or be touched” (De rerum natura I, 304), and Seneca, although a Stoic, explicitly cites and endorses this line of Lucretius in his Letter 106. (We mention this especially because Amo closely paraphrases this line, although he cites it from a modern rather than an ancient source.)

5.2.  The Modern Debate on Action/​Passion and Sense-​ Perception: Influxus Physicus and Sensible Species We will now fast-​forward to Descartes, and to the arguments of his successors about “physical influx” and occasionalism and preestablished harmony, although we will come back later to discuss one important medieval development. One important difference from the ancient discussions is that Descartes, and many of the philosophers who come after him, do not believe in irrational (sensitive and vegetative souls), except perhaps in the dismissive sense in which it can be said that an animal’s blood is its soul. So when they ask about the roles of soul and body in sensation or in voluntary motion, they are asking about the roles of the rational soul and of the body. Nonetheless, Descartes says that sensation is a mode not of mind alone or of body alone but of the mind-​body union, and this bears some resemblance to Aristotle’s saying that sensation is a common passion of soul and body. Descartes sometimes says that a sensation is an idea existing in the mind, but it is a special kind of idea, an idea vividly presented but without a clearly represented content, which the mind can have only when it is substantially united to a body. Descartes at the beginning of his Passions of the Soul (a work that Amo repeatedly cites) repeats the Aristotelian thesis that a passion of one thing is an action of another thing: a passion of the soul, in particular, is an action of the body that acts on the soul, and the body that immediately acts on my soul is always my own body or a part of my own body. Descartes admits that we do not have a clear idea of how our mind and our body act on each other. Nonetheless, we know by immediate experience that they act on each sensation is an assent to a certain kind of impression, and the assent is an action of the soul (specifically, of its ruling part); but the impression is the soul’s being-​acted-​on, by our body or by an external body. Some crucial Stoic texts on sensations and impressions are collected in Long and Sedley, Sections  39–​40.

Introduction  93 other, and we have primitive ideas of their modes of action on each other—​ primitive in the sense that these ideas are simply given to us with the mind-​ body union (given to us as part of being embodied), and are not derived from any more basic ideas that we could use to explain them. But the ideas that are given to us with the mind-​body union are given to us for practical guidance, for the preservation of the mind-​body union (that is, for staying alive), not to give us theoretical knowledge of the essences of things: we cannot expect them to give us a clear idea of how the body produces ideas in the mind in sensation, or how the mind produces motions in the body. Since Descartes thinks that mind-​body and body-​mind causality are not going to be analyzable into anything else, he does not try to investigate how they occur, except that he insists that all action of bodies on our mind occurs through one immediate bodily agent. This means, most obviously, that whenever an external body acts on our mind, the external body acts first on our body, which then acts immediately on our mind; but Descartes also makes the stronger claim that whenever a body acts on our mind, it first acts on one central organ of our body (which Descartes identifies with the pineal gland embedded in the brain), which then acts immediately on our mind. Conversely, whenever our mind acts on some external body, our mind acts first on our body, which then acts on the external body; and, Descartes says, our mind acts immediately on the central organ, which then acts on the rest of our body and thereby also on external bodies. But Descartes is introducing the theory of the central organ in order to solve particular problems, notably about how misleading sensory information arises. The theory of the central organ could not solve the fundamental problem of how bodies can act on minds and vice versa, since it explains the action of one body on the mind by the action of another body on the mind, and the action of the mind on one body by the action of the mind on another body. But Descartes was not trying to solve that fundamental problem, which he thought could not be solved and did not need to be solved. But many later philosophers, including Leibniz and Amo, are dissatisfied with Descartes’s accounts of body-​mind and mind-​body causality. The ancient arguments about the conditions of action and passion, and specifically about whether indivisible and unextended things can act or be acted on (and, if so, how), are revived in this modern post-​Cartesian context. Often the revived arguments are directed against the scholastics, but they may have consequences for Descartes too. These modern arguments occur sometimes in the context of the “three systems”—​“physical influx,” occasionalism, and

94  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations preestablished harmony—​and sometimes in the context of “sensible species” and the explanation of sensation. In particular, although Amo apparently never uses the phrase “physical influx,” his arguments against the possibility of bodies acting on spirits are a version of the arguments used against physical influx by followers of the other systems. Amo’s own theories of causality and of mind-​body relations cannot be easily aligned with any of the three standard systems, but philosophers used the same or very similar arguments against physical influx to motivate different positive theories. Indeed, the opponent—​the system of physical influx—​is first constituted by these arguments against it: the system exists in order to have its errors exposed and so to motivate more satisfying alternatives. There are people, like Amo’s contemporary (and Kant’s teacher) Martin Knutzen in his Systema causarum efficientium seu Commentatio philosophica de commercio mentis et corporis per influxum physicum explicando ipsis illustris Leibnitii principiis superstructa (System of Efficient Causes, or Philosophical Treatise that the Commerce of the Mind and of the Body is to be Explained by Physical Influx, Built upon the Illustrious Leibniz’ own Principles),197 who explicitly defend the system of physical influx, but this makes sense only as a later reaction against occasionalism and preestablished harmony—​Knutzen will turn Leibniz’s arguments around, in the best dissertation style, to show that they really support the system Leibniz is attacking. The phrase “physical influx” does occur, apparently just once and in passing, in Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations (XVII, 2, 6), but there it just means “real efficient causality,” not any particular theory of how this causality happens. But the opponents of physical influx try to suggest either that people who believe in physical influx believe that causality happens by some material part being transferred from the cause to the effect, or at least that they habitually think of causality as if it happened in this way, and have no clear conception of any alternative way it could happen. Leibniz especially uses the phrase, and gives “influx” (a few times “physical influx” or “real influx”),198 occasionalism, and preestablished harmony, 197 This is the second edition, Leipzig:  Langenheim, 1745; first edition, Königsberg:  Reusner, 1735, under the shorter title Commentatio philosophica de commercio mentis et corporis per influxum physicum explicando, from a Königsberg disputation with Knutzen as praeses and Christophorus Fridericus Grube as respondens. 198 Leibniz usually just says “influxus” in Latin or “influence” in French, but he uses “influence physique” notably at Theodicy, Part I, paragraph 59 (in Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. J. Gerhardt, 7 vols., Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–​1890, v. 6, p. 135) and at New Essays on Human Understading, Book II, Chapter 9, §8 (in Gerhardt v.5, p. 123). The latter passage is in G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. and tr. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 135, but they translate as “real influence.”

Introduction  95 as three competing “hypotheses” or “systems” for explaining the so-​called commercium between mind and body, the correspondence and apparent causal interaction between events in the mind (sensations and volitions) and events in the body. While many earlier authors had spoken of “occasions” or “occasional causes” (as opposed to causes in the strict sense) triggering God or a human soul to act as genuine efficient causes, occasionalism as put forward by Malebranche (and sometimes attributed to Descartes) is the thesis that all apparent efficient causes other than God are merely occasions triggering God to act according to his general rules of action; and so in particular whatever happens in our sense-​organs can only serve as an occasion for God to produce some event in our mind.199 Leibniz’s goal is to convince his reader that physical influx gives no intelligible explanation of mind-​body relations, that occasionalism gives an intelligible and possible explanation but one that we should accept only as a last resort, because it would involve a continual miraculous divine intervention, and that we should therefore accept preestablished harmony, no matter how unlikely it sounds, as long as it is intelligible and possible. Wolff takes this trichotomy of hypotheses or systems over from Leibniz, and in the process fixes the technical term “physical influx,” rather than simply “influx.” When Leibniz speaks of “influx” in general or “physical influx” in particular, he is fastening onto some phrases in Suárez’s discussions of what the different Aristotelian kinds of cause (material, formal, efficient, final) have in common and of what is specific to efficient causality. Leibniz complains that the scholastics rely too much on metaphors and other “tropical” terms,200 Leibniz does sometimes say “real influx” rather than “physical influx,” with no apparent difference in meaning. 199 Some Cartesians held theses weaker than Malebranche’s (e.g,. that only spirits are real efficient causes, and that bodies can only be occasional causes) which might more broadly described as occasionalist. For surveys of varieties of early modern occasionalism, and discussion of how they arose from reflection on Descartes, see Steven Nadler, Occasionalism:  Causation Among the Cartesians, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, and Tad Schmaltz, “Cartesian Occasionalisms,” Chapter  4 in his Early Modern Cartesianisms:  Dutch and French Constructions, Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2016. While Amo rejects Malebranchean occasionalism, he may well think that bodies (or bodily events) are occasional causes of sensory cognition, although occasions for the human mind to act, not for God: see Section 6.2, on Amo on bodies as occasional causes of sensory cognition. Leibniz and other contemporary authors normally say not “occasionalism” but “systema [or hypothesis] assistentiae” or “systema [or hypothesis] causarum occasionalium.” “Assistentia” here might mean that the supposed cause is merely present rather than acting, but it probably refers to God’s coming to the aid of the supposed cause. “System” is used equivalently to “hypothesis,” or to a hypothesis together with what can be inferred from it: this is originally a metaphor from astronomical systems such as the Ptolemaic or Copernican system. 200 Leibniz is here probably assuming the standard list of “tropes” or non-​literal uses of a term, namely metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.

96  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations and he gives as his main example that “Suárez . . . has defined “cause,” barbarously and obscurely enough, as “quod influit esse in aliud” (“what flows being into another”?), which (Leibniz says) is ungrammatical because Suárez is using the intransitive verb “influere” as transitive, and “this ‘influere’ is also metaphorical, and more obscure than what is being defined.”201 In context, Suárez is trying to explain what we mean when we say that something’s matter, its form, its maker and the end for which it is made are all causes of the thing. They cannot all be called causes in the same sense (“univocally”); rather, each of them is a sense of “cause,” but Suárez wants there to be something independent of our thoughts and linguistic conventions that allows us to assert that all of these are causes and that there are no other kinds of cause. This will be, in scholastic technical terminology, a “common objective concept,” which applies to all of them, although not to all of them in the same way.202 Suárez considers some earlier formulations of this common objective concept (what answers a why-​question? that on which something follows, or from which something depends?) but prefers “principle per se flowing being into another,” because “principle” gives us a genus for “cause,” and the differentia “per se flowing being,” which he says means the same as “giving or communicating being to something else,” excludes privations and merely per accidens causes (DM XII, 2, 4). So Suárez wants to require that if X is a cause for Y, then Y is because X is, excluding cases where something follows from an absence (“it fell because there was nothing holding it up”), since an absence cannot communicate being. Thomas Aquinas had already spoken of an “influx of being” from God that continually keeps creatures existing (Summa Theologiae Part I, Question 104, article 4, reply to second objection), but he did not offer this as a definition of “cause.” For Thomas, only God can cause being, can cause other things to exist: other things can cause, but they cannot cause being—​they can only cause some already existing thing to have some new predicate, e.g., fire can cause something to be hot, but not

201 In Gerhardt v.4, p. 148; from Leibniz’s introduction to Marius Nizolius’s De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi (1670). 202 Suárez grants, for instance, that it applies to formal and material causes only derivatively. An “objective concept,” in Suárez’s usage, is not something in the mind, but what the concept in the mind (the “formal concept”) is a concept of. If a name is univocal, then it signifies a single objective concept, but Suárez also recognizes cases where a non-​univocal name can signify a single objective concept, which applies to all of the things that the name stands for, but does not apply to all of them in the same way. Suárez says at DM XXVII, 1, 10–​11, that the material and formal causes are not called “cause” univocally with the efficient and final causes, but only by analogy with them; and at DM XXVII, 1, 9 that “cause” does not apply univocally even to all efficient causes, e.g., not to God and created efficient causes.

Introduction  97 to be.203 But Suárez insists that all causing, whether done by God or by any­ thing else, is causing being. Even fire makes the accident of heat exist, and created causes can give being not only to accidents but also to substances: for instance, my parents were causes of my existing, and I am a substance. In apparently the only place in the Disputations where Suárez mentions physical influx, he is dividing efficient causes into “physical” and “moral,” where an example of a moral cause would be someone who encourages or advises someone committing an act of violence—​he does not do it himself, but may still be morally responsible for it. As Suárez says, “ ‘physical cause’ is not taken here for a corporeal or natural cause acting by a corporeal and material motion, but more universally for a cause truly and really influencing the effect [influens in effectum]: for, as we said above that ‘nature’ sometimes signifies any essence, so too an [influx] which happens through a true, real, proper and per se causality is sometimes called ‘physical influx,’ and in this way God is a ‘physical’ cause when he creates [etc.]” (DM XVII, 2, 6). All this seems so innocuous that it is hard to see why Leibniz would want to object to Suárez, much less take Suárez’s formulations as an expression of what is wrong with scholasticism in general. Certainly the language of “influx” or “flowing into” something is metaphorical, but most technical terms arise from frozen metaphors in one way or another, and Suárez is clear that neither the word “influx” nor the adjective “physical” imply that some part is passing out of the cause and into the effect. Leibniz might reply that while a metaphorical term is acceptable if we understand clearly what it is standing for, what Suárez means by “influx” is “more obscure than what is being defined.” The vagueness of Suárez’s definition is the price he pays for making it so general that it will cover material, formal, efficient and final causes: perhaps the reason he can’t find a clear expression for what these four causes have in common is that they don’t have anything in common. But Leibniz seems to be worried, not about what the four kinds of cause have in common, but about whether Suárez has a clear conception even of efficient causality. He thinks Suárez’s description implies that the efficient cause must be transferring to the effect either some material part or something analogous to a material part, and that if it is not a material part then Suárez has no clear conception of what the analogue would be: if it is supposed to be a quality or something in one of the other Aristotelian categories of accidents, then an accident cannot leave one substance and join another. So in a comment on

203

Summa Theologiae, Part I, Questions 44–​5, esp. 44a1–​2 and 45a1 and 45a5.

98  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations his New System of Nature (in a letter to Basnage de Beauval) Leibniz asks us to consider three ways of explaining why two clocks always keep the same time, analogous to the three hypotheses for explaining the commercium of mind and body: “The way of influx is that of the vulgar philosophy [i.e., scholasticism]; but since we cannot conceive either of material particles, or of immaterial species or qualities, which could pass from one of these substance [i.e., mind and body] into the other, we are obliged to abandon this view.”204 Suárez would of course agree that neither a material part nor a quality passes from the efficient cause to the effect (unless by chance the same thing is both a material and an efficient cause of the same effect), but Leibniz insists that Suárez is still thinking as if there were such a transfer. Leibniz’s example of “immaterial species” helps to show why Leibniz finds this a plausible accusation against the scholastics. In many of the passages where Leibniz criticizes physical influx (by that name or some other description) or promotes preestablished harmony as superior to it, he is criticizing the theory of “sensible species,” which the scholastics use to explain how a sensible object can be the efficient cause of our sensing it even when the sensible object is not in contact with our sense-​organs (and, of course, the object is never in contact with our soul). For Aristotle we have sensory perception of an external object when the form of the object comes to be present in our sensitive soul (and somehow conjointly in our sense-​organ?): if the object is an F, we perceive it as an F by the form of F’s becoming present in our soul. The object itself must be the main efficient cause of that happening, but often, most obviously in the case of vision, the object is at a distance, and so, given Aristotle’s theory of action and passion from On Generation and Corruption I, 6–​10, there must be some immediate agent which is in contact with the patient. Aristotle refuses to say with Empedocles and Democritus (and later Epicurus) that the object sheds some material part of itself which travels through pores or the void to hit our senses; rather, the object acts on the medium between it and us, and then the medium acts on our senses. (In the case of vision, for the medium to be transparent and illuminated is precisely for it to be capable of being acted on by a colored surface, which makes the medium such that it can act on our sense of sight.) If this action of the object on the medium is supposed to explain how the form of the object comes to be in our soul (and in the appropriate 204 In Gerhardt, Philosophische Schriften, v.4, pp. 498–​9; in G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. and tr. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989, p. 148.

Introduction  99 sense-​organ), then presumably the object first acts on the medium in such a way that its form comes to be in the medium—​not because some material part of the object comes to be in the medium and bears its form with it, but because the object brings about a qualitative change in the medium. This form present in the medium is what the scholastics call a “sensible species” (a visible species, an audible species, etc.) of the object. There are many problems about what such species are (they do not seem to involve the medium being qualitatively changed in the obvious way, since if I am looking across the room at a yellow object and, at right angles to my line of sight, you are looking across the room at a blue object, the colors do not combine to turn the air green in the middle), about how they are caused by the object, and about how they cause perception. Maybe if we know how visible species are produced in the transparent medium, that will also explain how visible species are then produced in the transparent humors within the eye, but why would that cause me to perceive the visible object, when it does not cause the air in the room to perceive? Presumably because I have a sensitive soul and the air in the room does not. But if the visible species in my eye is to explain why I perceive the object, it must explain why something happens in my sensitive soul. The usual answer is that, just as the visible species in the air outside my eye generates a visible species inside my eye, so the visible species in my eye generates a visible species in my sensitive soul; and a visual species present in a sensitive soul, unlike a visible species present in a body, constitutes an act of visual perception. Leibniz is saying that this kind of explanation cannot work. A visible species in my eye cannot cause my soul to perceive, any more than a visible species in the medium can. There is a fundamental gap between body and soul which cannot be crossed in this way. Leibniz thinks that whoever tries to explain perception in this way is surreptitiously thinking of the soul as something like a body, with some bodies adjacent to the soul as some bodies are adjacent to other bodies, and thinking that something can move from a body to the adjacent soul, just as something can move from a body to the adjacent body. (Leibniz seems to think that the scholastics are surreptitiously thinking of their sensible species as like Democritean or Epicurean eidôla—​the thin films which sensible bodies were supposed to cast off into the surrounding void—​so that they would be thinking of the species as like a material part that detaches itself from the object and moves first into one recipient and then into another. He thinks that they say that it is a quality, rather than a material part, to make it more plausible that it could come to be in the soul, which has no

100  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations material parts, but that they are still thinking of it on the model of a material part. In fact the scholastics say that a species does not move from one recipient to another, but rather remains where it is and generates a species similar to itself in the adjacent recipient. But Leibniz would say that that is a verbal dodge to avoid the objection that a quality cannot depart from its subject and continue to exist, and that they are still thinking of the species as moving from one recipient to another, because they are still thinking of it as a material part that has been detached from the object.) Even if they can explain how a species of redness comes to be in my soul from the species of redness in the air, which comes to be from the redness in the visible object, this could only explain how something in my soul comes to be red, not how it comes to represent redness, to be about redness: and indeed it must somehow come to be, not just about redness in general, or about the species of redness in my eye or in the air that immediately caused the species of redness in my soul, but about the redness in the object that I am seeing from a distance. As Leibniz says against species-​ theories, “Our soul always has within it the quality of representing any nature or form, when the occasion presents itself of thinking about it. And I believe that this quality of our soul, inasmuch as it expresses some nature, form or essence, is properly the idea of the thing which is in us, and which is always in us whether we are thinking about it or not. For our soul expresses God and the universe, and all essences as well as all existences. This is in accord with my principles, for by nature nothing enters into our mind from outside, and it is a bad habit of ours to think as if our soul received species as messengers, and as if it had doors and windows.”205 205 Discourse on Metaphysics §26, in Gerhardt v.4, p. 451, in Ariew and Garber p. 58. Compare Monadology §7: “There is thus no way to explain how a Monad could be altered or changed in its interior by any other creature: for nothing can be transposed in it, nor can we conceive in it any internal movement which could be aroused, directed, increased or diminished within it, as can happen in composites, where there can be exchanges among the parts. Monads have no windows through which something could go in or out. Accidents cannot be detached or move around outside of substances, as the Scholastics’ sensible species used to do. Thus neither a substance nor an accident can enter into a Monad from outside” (in Gerhardt v.6, pp. 607–​608, in Ariew and Garber p. 213). Leibniz does not use the word “influx” here for the transmission of species, but he does, e.g., in the letter to Basnage de Beauval cited in note 205 and the connected main text. On Scholastic accounts, a species of color or of redness is not itself a color or a redness: the color inheres in the surface we see across the transparent medium, while the species is an effect that that color has (given the presence of light) on the transparent medium, so is present not on a surface but in the body of the medium, and is not itself seen. While early modern anti-​Scholastics polemically assimilate Scholastic sensible species to Epicurean eidôla, as if a table emitted a table-​shaped species into the medium, in fact the Scholastics think that the color at each point on the surface “multiplies” species of that color in straight lines in all directions across the medium. Medieval optics starting from Ibn al-​Haitham (Alhazen) then undertakes, with much success, to explain how in this apparent chaos of species transmitted in all directions we are able to perceive coherent objects. There is a good introduction to

Introduction  101

6.  The Argument of the Impassivity and the Distinct Idea 6.1.1.  Amo’s Theories of Sensation, Mind–​Body Relations, and Cognitive and Conative Intentions The Impassivity is structured as an argument for its one grand thesis, or, as Amo prefers to state it, for a negative thesis, that sensation and the power of sensing do not belong to the human mind, followed by a positive thesis, that they instead belong to the body. The positive thesis is an immediate corollary of the negative thesis, since “sense and the faculty of sensing [must] belong either to the mind or to the body,” and no further effort is spent proving the positive part. All the effort of proof goes into the negative thesis, which also gives us the main title of the dissertation, De humanae mentis ἀπαθεία: Amo consistently uses the Greek word, speaking of the “ἀπάθεια” of the human mind or of spirits in general, meaning that they cannot be acted on (and therefore cannot sense, since sensing is a way of being acted on by the sensed object), rather than trying to find a Latin equivalent, impassivitas or the like. The Impassivity is clearer about what the mind does not do than what it does do, but it does give a sketch of how the mind operates, whose crucial element is the thesis that the mind always operates through an “intention,” in the technical sense that Amo introduces here and develops in subsequent works. The Distinct Idea works out the implications of this thesis for the three main kinds of “operations of the mind,” namely “(1) the mind’s act of understanding, or intellect; (2) the mind’s act of willing and nilling; (3) the mind’s act of effecting, or effective act,” and uses the theory of intentions to test Le Clerc’s list of seven faculties of the mind, to see whether (or how far) these faculties really belong to the mind and not rather to the body. Much of what is novel in the Tractatus is also developing the consequences of the thesis of the Impassivity and the theory of intentions. We will sketch here the main argument of the Impassivity, including Amo’s attempt to expose and resolve the contradictions of earlier authors about whether sensation belongs to the soul or to the body. We will then point out difficulties that arise for understanding mental activity given Amo’s thesis that sensation belongs purely to the body, and sketch how he develops the theory of intentions, first in the Impassivity and then more fully in the Distinct Idea and the Tractatus, to try to solve these this history in David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-​Kindi to Kepler, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

102  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations difficulties and to give a positive alternative account, both of how the mind can cognize bodies and of how it can act on bodies. Amo says more clearly what he is against, and why, than what he is for; but he is clearly committed to thinking that minds can both cognize and act on bodies, and his positive account, although sketchy, is extremely interesting. The foundation of Amo’s whole theory of the mind is the negative argument of the Impassivity that sensation cannot belong to the mind. This is fundamentally a metaphysical argument, turning on the metaphysical theory of mind and body as substances, and of the kinds of causal relations there can be between such substances, which is Amo’s version of the legacy of Descartes and of post-​Cartesian metaphysics. Amo is also responding to authors who are working in a more traditional Aristotelian framework, but he is fundamentally separated from them by his insistence, following Descartes, that every substance is either a mind or a body, or, as Amo prefers to say, either a spirit or a body, where the human mind is a particular kind of spirit and every spirit is a purely rational soul capable of existing independently of bodies. In particular, Amo follows Descartes in rejecting sensitive and vegetative souls of animals and plants, or more precisely in reinterpreting them, allowing that whatever is responsible for an animal’s being alive can be called its soul, but insisting that for a non-​human animal this “soul” is not a further incorporeal substance but just some particular body—​both Descartes and Amo cite Old Testament passages saying that the soul of an animal is its blood.206 Both Cartesians and more traditional Aristotelian philosophers tend to say that sensation is an act of the soul-​body composite, but in both cases there is at least some verbal wavering about whether sensation should be attributed to the soul-​body composite, the soul, or the body (perhaps in different senses of “sensation,” or with different kinds of attribution); perhaps the verbal wavering reflects some deeper conceptual difficulties. Amo aims to resolve the controversy by demonstrating that sensation belongs to the body alone. 206 Descartes cites Leviticus 17:14 and Deuteronomy 12:23 (in a letter to Plemp for Fromond, AT I, 414–​15); Amo (Impassivity, Chapter 2, Sole Member, §2, Thesis 2, Proof) also cites Leviticus 17:14, and also Genesis 9:4. The biblical context is usually a prohibition against eating or drinking an animal’s blood: since in Jewish law you can only sacrifice in the Temple at Jerusalem, you can’t make a sacrifice each time you eat an animal, but you can at least pour its blood out to return its life/​soul to God as the giver of life/​soul rather than consuming it yourself. For Aristotle and his followers, plants have vegetative souls, non-​human animals have both vegetative and sensitive souls, and humans have vegetative and sensitive and rational souls; it was disputed whether these are three different souls in a human being, or three parts of a single soul, or just a single soul performing three different functions. For Aristotle, all three kinds of soul are incorporeal substances, that is, substances which are not bodies, but non-​rational souls are not capable of existing independently of a living body, and it was disputed whether even rational souls are.

Introduction  103 As noted, his argument is fundamentally metaphysical. Basing himself on the standard post-​Cartesian metaphysics, Amo argues that a spirit cannot be acted on by a body (it is not entirely clear whether he is also saying that a spirit cannot be acted on by another spirit, e.g., by God). Then he asserts that sensation is a passion, i.e., a being-​acted-​on by a body; so, since a spirit cannot be acted on (at least not by a body), sensation cannot belong to a spirit; so since there is nothing to belong to except spirits and bodies, sensation must belong to a body, and the only candidate is, as Amo says, “our organic and living body.” The premise that sensation is a passion or affection, a being-​acted-​on by a sensible body, was in a sense uncontroversial. Both Aristotle and Descartes say this,207 and everyone agrees that it is true in some sense. But many philosophers think that within what is loosely called sensation there is a series of events, however they may describe them—​perhaps we are first affected by an external body, and then we become consciously aware of the affection (or of the external body itself), or we pass judgment on the appearance of an external body, etc.—​and there is at least verbal disagreement on which of these stages is properly called sensation. Amo is, to some extent, just legislating that only the first stage, the being-​acted-​on by a sensible body, should be called sensation, and then he has an argument that this event is not something that happens in the mind but only in the body. But then he will have to have something to say about what happens next, at least some of which does indeed happen in the mind, even if it is not properly called sensation. Amo defines sensation as “to be really affected, through the sensory organs, by the sensible properties of immediately present and material things” (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 2, §1). He is aware that “sensation” can be used more broadly, for acts other than the immediate affection by something bodily: as he says in the first Note attached to this definition, “every sensation is either mediate or immediate.” Mediate sensations, he says, are called “ideas,” and it will turn out that ideas are acts of intellection (Distinct Idea, Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 1, Notice), so that although ultimately dependent on sensation they take place in the mind.208 But Amo 207 Aristotle De Anima II, 5 416b32–​417a2, Descartes AT IV, 113–​14 and IV, 310–​11. 208 “An idea is a composite entity, for it exists when the mind sets up as present to itself a sensation that has preexisted in the body, and it is a represented sensation” (Impassivity, Chapter 2, Sole Member, Thesis 1, Note). Amo contrasts these represented sensations here with immediate sensations, which take place in the body. For ideas as acts of intellection see also Distinct Idea, Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 1, Notice. Amo gives a full discussion of ideas and representation in Tractatus, Special Part, Section I; he has a shorter discussion before that, in General Part, Chapter V, on the mind’s threefold act, with often close parallels to Distinct Idea Chapter 1.

104  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations here is making a claim about sensations in the strict sense, and those are what happen first in the process of cognition, namely being affected by a body. Amo says, citing especially Sennert, that “the ancients called this faculty of sensing the ‘sensitive soul’, clearly distinguished from the rational and vegetative souls” (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 2, §2, Note). Amo also cites Sennert for the theory of sensible species, which according to Sennert are received in a bodily sense-​organ, not in the soul (Impassivity, Chapter 2, Remark 2). Amo apparently feels no need to reject the old-​fashioned language of sensible species and sensitive souls, but given his post-​Cartesian ontological dualism, these sensible species and sensitive souls must fall either on the side of bodies or on the side of spirits. Amo’s negative argument is supposed to show that spirits cannot be affected by bodies, and cannot receive the species of bodies, so if there is anything that deserves to be called a sensitive soul or a sensitive species, it must be either a body or a property of a body. Perhaps these things can also be called “spirits,” but not in the strict sense in which a spirit is an immaterial substance, only in the loose sense in which Galen (followed by the whole medical-​physiological tradition including Descartes and Sennert and Löscher and his teachers) had spoken of “animal spirits” as a special kind of body, a subtle fluid flowing through the nerves and communicating sensation and voluntary motion.209 (What senses, Amo says, is what lives, and what lives, properly speaking, is not the soul but a body, namely whatever body “admits of the circulation of the blood,” which may be either a human body attached to an immaterial spirit or an animal body without an attached spirit.)210 The key, clearly, is Amo’s argument that a spirit cannot be acted on. This conclusion is supposed to be deduced (in Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Explanation 1 and the Applications of Explanation 1) from the clarification of the idea of spirit, expressed in the definition of spirit in Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1. (Amo starts by defining spirits in general, then specifies to the human mind as a spirit having commercium with a living and organic body: the idea of spirit as a quasi-​genus, including the human mind but also angels and also possibly God, is standard in post-​Cartesian texts on “Pneumatology” such as Jean Le Clerc’s.) Amo defines spirit in general 209 See Impassivity, Chapter  1, Member 1, §4, and Chapter  2, Sole Member, Thesis 1, Third Proof, Note. 210 So Impassivity, Chapter 2, Sole Member, §1, Thesis 1 (esp. the First Proof), and §2, Thesis 2, Proof (which brings in the circulation of the blood). Thesis 1, Second Proof, Note 1 insists that “to live and to sense are two inseparable predicates,” so apparently Amo does not think plants are alive.

Introduction  105 as “any purely active, immaterial substance which is always in itself understanding and operating spontaneously and intentionally on account of a determinate end of which it is conscious.” Now it surely follows, rather tautologously, that if something is purely active, it cannot be acted on. But if the argument were simply this, it would not accomplish what Amo wants: for, given this very strong stipulative definition of spirit, why should anyone concede that the only substances are bodies and spirits, or that the human mind is a spirit in this sense? Most interlocutors would find it easier to say that the human mind is a sometimes-​active-​and-​sometimes-​passive immaterial substance, and to deny that it is a spirit in the stipulated sense, than to admit that it cannot be acted on. But in fact Amo has much more to say. In effect the five “Explanations of the Immediately Preceding Description of Spirit” (with their attached Proofs or Reasons, Notes, Examples, Applications and Corollaries) serve as arguments to justify (as well as clarify) the various clauses in the definition of spirit. Or, to put it the other way around, the definition of spirit summarizes the conclusions of the multiple arguments of Chapter  1, Member 1, §1, rather than stating a principle that all these arguments build on. Explanation 1 (with its attachments) gives the argument that spirit cannot be acted on; Explanations 2–​4 argue for and explain Amo’s alternative positive description of how spirit operates. Fundamentally, Explanation 1 is proceeding from the assumption that spirit is an immaterial substance, which Amo apparently assumes will be the least controversial part of his definition of spirit. He may give a (very short and circular-​looking) argument for the immateriality of spirit in Explanation 5, but it is more likely that in Explanation 5 he is assuming that spirit is immaterial, and indeed contrary to matter, and inferring that it shares no attributes with matter. Probably Amo just assumes that enough philosophers have argued well enough already that spirits, and the human mind in particular, are immaterial substances (or, contrapositively, that matter does not think), and that he does not need to reargue that case now. Explanation 1 takes up the phrase from the description of spirit which says that “a spirit is [a]‌purely active, immaterial substance”: Explanation 1 says, in explaining this, “I say that a spirit is a purely active substance, which is the same as to say that a spirit does not admit any passion it itself,” and then Amo argues for this thesis. His argument certainly draws on the assumption that spirit is an immaterial substance, and it also seems to draw on the conclusion of Explanation 5 that “it has nothing material in its essence and its properties,” i.e., that it shares no attributes with matter—​in particular, that it

106  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations has no parts, spatial extension, or boundaries. The basic argument is that “if a spirit were said to sense, or to admit passion within itself, this would have to occur either by communication, or by penetration, or, finally, by contact.” Amo then explains what he means by each of these three possible modes of action and passion, and gives arguments against each of them in turn. But all of these arguments are variants of the standard modern arguments, developed notably by Leibniz, against the physical influx of bodies on spirits (which, if it happens at all, would happen especially in sensation); and these in turn draw on the ancient arguments that we have surveyed. Amo’s general argument is that any of the ways we can conceive of a body as acting are ways that are genuinely intelligible only if the body is acting on another body, not if it is acting on a spirit: so we can represent a body as acting on a spirit only if we surreptitiously represent the spirit as a body, or at any rate as having the kind of attributes that belong only to bodies, such as parts, extension and boundaries.211 Most straightforwardly, Amo says, a spirit does not sense or undergo passion through contact. For whatever touches and is touched is a body . . . Again, contact occurs when two surfaces mutually touch one another in a physical point; neither a sensible point nor a surface can be predicated of spirit, thus neither can passion to the extent that it is supposed to arise through contact” (Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Explanation 1, I say, 3). As we have already seen, the tag “whatever touches and is touched is a body,” or rather its contrapositive “nothing except a body can touch or be touched,” is a line of Lucretius (De rerum natura I, 304), following Epicurus but also explicitly endorsed by Seneca from a Stoic position. Both the Epicureans and the Stoics think that all action is by contact, and they both take it for granted that the body acts on the soul and vice versa, and so they infer that the soul is itself a body. Amo, who explicitly cites for this tag not the hazardous Lucretius but a respectable modern source,212 assumes, like the modern Christian authors he cites, that it has been shown that the soul is not a body and does not have 211 We will take the three cases in the reverse of Amo’s order. 212 Amo cites it from a letter of Descartes, but the passage he apparently refers to there does not contain this tag. However, Henry More does cite the tag, explicitly from Lucretius, and apparently endorses it, in a letter to Descartes that was printed in editions of Descartes’s correspondence. On all this see our note at Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Explanation 1, I say, 3. Amo cites Descartes’s letters, as well as the Passions of the Soul, very frequently, but he seems to cite letters to Descartes, and a letter written after Descartes’s death by his editor Claude Clerselier, as if they had the same status as Descartes’s own letters. A plausible explanation for this, as well as for the sometimes mistaken page-​ references, would be that Amo did not own the volumes of Descartes’s letters, but rather read them in a library and took notes on them, and then used his notes in writing his dissertations. He might in his notes have written down a passage with a page-​reference without writing down whether it was from a letter by or to Descartes. (Thanks to Dwight Lewis for discussion on this.)

Introduction  107 boundaries like bodies; and so he infers, from the premise that any action—​ or, at least, any action that could be attributed to a body—​is by contact or one of other modes of action that he lists, to the conclusion that bodies do not act on the soul.213 But why list three different modes of action, not just contact—​how can action and passion take place if not by contact? Some could also act, perhaps without contact, by “penetration,” which is “the passage of one entity, by means of some act, between the parts of another entity” (Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Explanation 1, Note 2). One body could act on another by penetration if, for instance, the patient body has empty pores, and particles of the agent body pass through those pores into the interior of the patient body. If the pores are large enough (and genuinely empty), and the particles are small enough, the particles might pass through the pores without touching anything; and yet they might bring about a change in the patient body, by coming to be part of it. (Aristotle would say that this cannot happen without contact, since if X was not previously a part of Y, it cannot become a part of Y except by acting and being acted on by the other parts of Y, and X and the other parts will not be able to act on each other unless they touch.) In any case this cannot explain how something acts on a spirit, since spirits have no parts which could allow something to pass between them: “no spirit senses or undergoes passion by means of penetration, since penetration is the passage of an entity between the parts of another entity, but no spirit has constitutive parts” (Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Explanation 1, I say, 2). As with contact, attributing this mode of passion to spirits depends on imaging spirits as having spatially extended parts as bodies do. However, the fundamental point is not just that spirits do not have extended parts, but that they do not have parts at all. “Penetration” seems to involve something like the pores or atoms-​and-​the-​void models of action that Aristotle describes in On Generation and Corruption I, 8. But, even apart from the detail about passing between different parts of the patient in order to avoid contact, “penetration” is obviously a version of Leibniz’s description of physical influx, as if some part of the agent (or something conceived as if it were a part of the agent) were passing into the patient (through a “window,” as Leibniz says sarcastically in the texts cited earlier). When we are trying to explain sense-​perception, the obvious thing to be passing from agent to 213 We will return later to the question of whether non-​bodily agents can act in some other way besides these three.

108  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations patient would be a sensible species. Amo’s description of a “penetration” explanation of sense-​perception suggests that the sensible species is something like an Epicurean eidôlon, moving through the void to enter the patient perhaps through the pupil of the eye; which is obviously impossible if the patient (the perceiver) is a non-​extended spirit and cannot have anything enter it and be part of it. But Amo speaks more generally of “communication,” whose description does not require these spatial concepts (“passage between the parts”), and where what passes from the agent to the patient does not have to be a (former) substantial part of the agent: Note 1. By “communication” I understand when the parts, properties, and effects of one entity become present, by means of some act, in another entity which is analogous and suited [to receive those parts, properties and effects]. Example. In this way fire [communicates] its heat to a glowing iron, although we do not see it communicate itself. Again, if we are trying to explain sense-​perception, the obvious thing to be becoming present in the patient would be a sensible species. But the “communication” description, unlike the “penetration” description, seems to allow that the sensible species might not be a (former) substantial part of the agent as an Epicurean eidôlon is a former substantial part of the sensible body that emits it. It might instead be a “property” of the agent, perhaps a quality like the heat of the fire: fire communicates its heat to a glowing iron, but it is not clear that any part of the fire itself (assuming that fire is some kind of body, not a quality or a process) comes to be present in the iron. Certainly it is more accurate to say that the scholastics thought of sensible species as like qualities of the agent than to say that they thought of them as like parts of the agent, and it is to Amo’s credit that he wants a refutation that will not depend on assimilating sensible species to detached parts of the sensible object. It may also be—​ although Amo’s description is brief and leaves us guessing—​that in some cases what the agent communicates to the patient is neither a (former) part of the agent nor even a property of the agent, but only an effect of the agent, a property which is not straightforwardly true of the agent itself but which it has the power to produce in something else. An example might be Suárez’s view that whenever an agent acts on a patient, then (whether or not the agent also produces some new substance or quality)

Introduction  109 it always produces an action, a non-​substantial entity in one of the minor Aristotelian categories, which inheres not in the agent itself but in the patient. One and the same entity inhering in the patient is both, from the point of view of the agent, an action, making it true of the agent to say that it acts, and, from the point of view of the patient, a passion, making it true of the patient to say that it is acted on; and this action-​entity is what Suárez calls the “causality” of the efficient cause, i.e., that by which the cause is a cause. This view does not involve any part or quality ceasing to belong to the agent and coming to belong to the patient; it does involve something (the action) coming to belong simultaneously to the agent and the patient, but not belonging to them both in the same way, but rather as the same road is both, from the Athenian point of view, a road to Thebes, and, from the Theban point of view, a road to Athens.214 This is significantly different from the standard modern caricatures of physical influx, and it is not obvious that the same arguments will be effective against it. But, if Amo is envisaging this possibility (which is not entirely clear), he tries to handle it with the same general argument that he uses against the communication of “parts” or “properties”: No parts, properties, or effects of another entity can become present in a spirit by means of some act. Otherwise the spirit would contain in its essence and substance something other than what it was supposed to contain.215 Again, to contain and to be contained are material concepts, nor can they be truly predicated of spirit. Therefore a spirit does not sense through communication, i.e., in such a way that the material parts, properties and effects of an entity would become present in it by means of some act.

So the fundamental problem, common to the communication of “parts,” “properties,” and “effects,” is that anything which can be communicated by some act (perhaps he means specifically: by an act of a body) would not be the

214 For Suárez on every efficient cause having an action, see DM XVII, 1, 5–​6 (although he says at XVII, 1, 6 that the action is not properly an effect of the agent but rather “a path to the effect, or the dependence of the effect on the agent”). The agent’s action is really identical with (only rationally distinct from) the patient’s passion, and inheres in the patient (XLIX, 1, at length); the action is the causalitas of the efficient cause (XVIII, 10, at length). For the basic thesis that the action is really identical with the passion and inheres in the patient, Suárez is following Aristotle, esp. Physics III, 3 (with the comparison to the road from Thebes to Athens and vice versa). 215 “Other than what it was supposed to contain” here is “aliud . . . quam continere debet” (Latin debere = German sollen). So “what it was supposed to contain” here means “what it should contain,” “what it ought to contain,” not “what it was assumed to contain,” “what it was hypothesized to contain.”

110  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations kind of thing that could be contained in a spirit. Indeed, Amo suggests here that the concept of “containment,” when applied not to bodies but to spirits, is itself problematically material or spatial. Does Amo want to say that nothing at all can be contained in a spirit? Certainly nothing can be contained in a spirit as a part is contained in a whole or as a thing is contained in a place or in a vessel. But does he want to say that nothing is contained in a spirit as an accident in a subject? He certainly thinks there are some things we can attribute to a spirit, and not all of these are essential attributes of spirit: for instance, that a spirit is currently thinking or desiring something. And (unlike Kant and the German idealists) Amo sees no trouble in describing human minds and other individual spirits as substances; so it seems that they should have accidents. We will return to the issue when we come to Amo’s positive alternative account of how the mind operates, but it is clear that he thinks that something can be attributed to a spirit only if it is some further determination of what is essential to spirits, and that this always involves ascribing an “intention” (in Amo’s technical sense) to some particular spirit; and it may not be appropriate to describe this as something being “in” the spirit. In any case it is clear that Amo thinks the problem arises from the heterogeneity of bodies and spirits—​recall that on his definition, “communication” happens “when the parts, properties, and effects of one entity become present, by means of some act, in another entity which is analogous and suited [to receive those parts, properties and effects]” (Chapter  1, Member 1, §1, Explanation 1, Note 1, as quoted earlier, but this time with our emphases), and there is no such “analogy” between bodies and spirits. No body has a part or attribute which could also be a part or attribute of a spirit, but also no body has an act directed toward an effect that could be received in a spirit. This is not just because of a restriction on what can be attributed to a spirit, but also because of a restriction on what can be attributed to bodies. Amo may not hold the strict Cartesian view that only modes of extension can be attributed to bodies, but he certainly thinks there are restrictions. On Aristotle’s way of thinking, a color, as a visible quality of bodies (or of the surfaces of bodies), is by its essence correlated with powers of vision, and powers of vision can only be in souls, although their exercise involves the soul’s cooperating with its bodily instrument: so the act that a color is essentially directed to producing is an act involving a soul. Amo, as a post-​Cartesian, refuses to admit any such essentially soul-​directed powers in bodies: any powers in bodies can only be powers for appropriate bodily effects. And so no act of a body

Introduction  111 will be such as to “communicate” something, whether a part of a body, a property of a body, or an effect of a body, to any spirit.

6.1.2  Amo on the Contradictions of the Authorities; Sennert and the Sensus Agens Debate In Chapter 1 of the Impassivity Amo gives negative arguments that the human mind is not acted on, and therefore by Amo’s definition of sensation does not sense, with the immediate consequence that it is instead our living and organic body that senses; he also develops the foundations of a positive alternative account of how the mind acts. But, in the context of the official overall structure of the Impassivity, all of this is laying a foundation for Chapter 2, which contains the “state of the controversy” and then the negative and positive theses (sensation and the power of sensing belong not to the mind but to the living and organic body) and their proofs. The only important material in Chapter 2 that we have not already seen in discussing Chapter 1 is Amo’s claim in the “state of the controversy” section to have revealed the self-​ contradictions of the authorities on sense-​perception that he selects there, namely Descartes, Sennert, and (Amo’s chosen target in the Distinct Idea) Jean Le Clerc. Amo cites all of these people as saying that sensation belongs to the mind or to the soul (for Descartes and Le Clerc the mind or rational soul is the only soul there is, but Sennert believes in a distinct sensitive soul), but then he also tries to show that in each case they contradict themselves, i.e., that each of them says something which would entail Amo’s thesis that sensation belongs to the body. As we have seen, it was a common function of dissertations to reveal the self-​contradictions of the authorities on a given subject, and Amo’s refutations of Descartes and Sennert and Le Clerc will be more effective if he can refute them out of premises that they themselves admit. This also allows Amo, if he wishes, to present himself as the heir of these earlier philosophers, saying what they should have said according to their own better judgment, and merely refuting their inadequate expressions. To some extent this is for show. When Amo argues that something these philosophers have said entails that sensation belongs to the body, in each case his argument uses some auxiliary premise that he himself accepts but that Descartes or Sennert or Le Clerc will not. It seems possible that Amo, rather than starting from Descartes or Sennert or Le Clerc, seeing that they were pulled both ways on the issue of sensation, and then solving the problem his

112  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations way, instead just came up with his own view independently and then went searching in his opponents’ writings for self-​contradictions or admissions of the opposite view. But there may be something more going on in Amo’s engagement with Descartes and perhaps especially with Sennert. Amo shares a great deal with Descartes on mind and body, but also has important disagreements about how the mind acts, both by itself and in conjunction with the body, and the confrontation with Descartes is useful for Amo in developing his own views by contrast. And Sennert, who keeps more of scholastic Aristotelianism than Descartes does, may have been a main source to Amo for the scholastic issues about sense-​perception, sensible species, and how they are caused. And Amo is drawing not only on Descartes and Leibniz (directly or via Wolff), but also on much older arguments about sensation and action and passion. We will quickly review the issues with Descartes and Le Clerc, and then say a bit more about Sennert and the scholastic issues that Amo may be picking up from him. Amo, in the “state of the controversy,” cites Descartes as saying that we know two fundamental things about the human soul, “one of which is that it thinks, the other that, united to a body, it is able to act and to suffer together with it.” For Descartes the basic distinction here is between what belongs to the mind in itself apart from its union to a body, namely modes of the attribute of thought which we can know intellectually, and what belongs to the mind only insofar as it is united with a body, modes of the mind-​body union, namely voluntary motion and sense-​perception and the passions of the soul that depend on it, which we know through experience without having clear intellectual knowledge of how they happen. Amo agrees with the basic point, but, he says, as he must, “we concede that the mind acts together with the body by means of a mutual union. But we deny that it suffers together with the body.” His reason for saying that Descartes contradicts himself is that Descartes “places the nature of the soul in the faculty of thinking alone, although thinking is an action of the mind, not a passion.” It is true that Descartes puts the essence of the mind in thinking alone, and treats even the mind’s sensing and acting in the body as kinds of thinking (kinds of thinking that the mind could not have unless it were united to the body). But why does Amo think this is a problem for Descartes? His reason, apparently, is that since thinking is an action rather than a passion, Descartes should not say that the mind suffers together with the body, since something can be attributed to the mind (even united with the body) only if it is a kind of thinking, and any kind of thinking is a kind of acting, not a kind of suffering.

Introduction  113 But although Amo accepts the premise that every kind of thinking is a kind of acting—​and this will be important for Amo’s positive theory of the mind’s action—​Descartes does not accept this premise. Rather, Descartes says that “intellection is properly the passion of the mind, and volition its action,” so that volition and intellection, which are both modes of thought, differ not as the mind’s actions toward different objects, but “as the action and passion of the same substance.”216 “Intellection” here has to be understood narrowly, to mean understanding something, grasping an idea of something, without making any judgment about it, i.e., without affirming or denying any proposition, since Descartes insists that judging or assenting is an act of the will (reacting to some idea that we have previously received by intellection) rather than being itself an act of the intellect.217 So Descartes thinks that what the mind would do by itself, apart from any connection with the body, would involve both some passions (understanding things or receiving ideas of them) and some actions (judging and wanting), where Amo thinks it would be purely active. And Descartes also thinks that the mind’s union with the body gives it both a distinctive way of being acted on (being acted on by the body, and indirectly by things outside the body, in such a way as to form obscure sensory ideas) and a distinctive way of acting (in that some of its volitions cause motions in the body). We have seen why Amo rejects Descartes’s view that the mind is acted on, and specifically that it is acted on by the body, but his challenge will be to find a positive alternative. Amo agrees with Descartes that the human mind (unlike other spirits) is united to a body, but it is not clear that this union will be (as Descartes says) a substantial union, and it is not clear that there will be modes of the mind-​body union, such as Descartes understands sensation to be. Amo will have the problem of explaining how the mind can make judgments if it has not first passively received the basic intelligible contents that it can combine into propositions and assent to. He will have a similar problem in explaining how the mind does whatever it does in response to a sensation in the body if it is not first affected by what happens in the 216 AT III, 372, cf. AT III, 454–​55. Both passages are in letters from Descartes to Henricus Regius from 1641. In the edition of Descartes’s letters that Amo cites, Renati Descartes Epistolae, Partim ab Auctore Latino sermone conscriptae, partim ex Gallico translatae, Pars Prima, Amsterdam: Apud Danielem Elzevirium, 1668, the first letter is v.1, Letter 84 (following Claude Clerselier’s numbering of Descartes’s letters), pp. 285–​88, the passage cited at p. 286. The latter is v.1, Letter 86 (again following Clerselier’s numbering), p. 289. See our notes to the translation on the editions of Descartes’s letters. 217 So in the fourth Meditation, AT VII, 56–​62.

114  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations body—​and the mind must be acting somehow if we can come to know anything from sense-​experience, and also if we can make voluntary motions that respond appropriately to what we sense. Indeed, he will have a problem in explaining how the mind can act on the body in voluntary motion at all. You might say that on this issue Amo is in no worse trouble than Descartes, since they agree that the mind has a primitive action on the body, “primitive” in the sense that it cannot be reduced to anything more basic. But there is an important difference. Descartes thinks that we have, by virtue of our union with the body, primitive concepts of the mind’s acting on the body in voluntary motion and of the body’s acting on the mind in sensation; and he thinks that, while these concepts are obscure (they do not make clear how one thing acts on the other), we have no choice but to accept them. Amo, however, has argued that the body does not really act on the mind, since it cannot touch the mind. If this revision of our ordinary concepts is justified, why would it not also imply that the mind does not really act on the body, since it cannot touch the body? Malebranchean occasionalism and Leibnizian pre-​ established harmony do take this step, and say that the refutation of physical influx implies that neither the mind nor the body can act on the other (nor, indeed, bodies on bodies). But Amo, despite his real agreements with Malebranche and Leibniz, clearly rejects this conclusion: as we have seen, he expressly agrees with Descartes that “the mind acts together with the body by means of a mutual union,” and he also insists that the mind has an “effective act” that produces motions in bodies—​indeed, Amo will say in the Tractatus that bodies cannot properly speaking act on bodies (or on anything else), so that strictly speaking the agent of anything in bodies is either a finite spirit or God.218 His problem will be to describe how the mind can act on bodies without being in contact with bodies, despite what his arguments against physical influx theories of sensation might appear to show; he will also have the problem of redescribing the apparent efficient causality that bodies have (by contact) on other bodies and (by the mind-​body union) on minds, if the bodies are not really acting. Amo’s criticism of Le Clerc’s alleged self-​contradiction sheds some light on his thinking about how the mind responds to sensations in the body. Le Clerc 218 On the mind’s effective act see Distinct Idea, Chapter 1, Member 1, §3, and Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 3. Tractatus, General Part, Chapter I, Member I, Observation, says that “except for God, the first cause of all things, every being is the effect of an intention previously carried through to its end” (p. 1); Tractatus, General Part, Chapter I, Member I, Observation, Demonstration II makes clear that the efficient cause can be either God or a human mind (p. 2). See discussion of this passage in Section 6.2.

Introduction  115 has said that we have properly speaking only one sense: our single “faculty of sensing”219 gets called by different names when it uses different organs, but “one and the same mind in us senses what is reported [for judgment] to it by the ears, eyes [etc.].” He thus stands opposed to Amo’s claim that sensation and the faculty of sensing are in the body rather than the mind. But Amo says that Le Clerc also contradicts this, since Le Clerc goes on to distinguish three things: “there is the action of the object on the organs of our body . . . there is the passion of the organ . . . [and] when the organ has been moved, the mind is struck, and senses that its body has been affected.” On the face of it, this seems entirely consistent with what Le Clerc has said before. But Amo protests that if the mind were genuinely sensing, Le Clerc should say “the mind senses that it itself has been affected” rather than “the mind senses that its body has been affected”; if the mind is not itself affected (as Le Clerc seems to admit when he says that the mind senses that the body has been affected, rather than that the mind itself has been), then, Amo says, Le Clerc should say that the mind understands, not senses, that the body has been affected. Le Clerc might perhaps answer that the mind is affected: its being “struck” is its being affected by the bodily organ, and when it is affected it rapidly infers that the body has also been affected, or perhaps the way it is affected by the body gives it an immediate non-​inferential awareness that the body has also been affected.220 If Le Clerc goes in this direction, then the dispute is about whether the mind is affected by the body, and Le Clerc will have to reply to Amo’s metaphysical arguments that it cannot be. Alternatively, Le Clerc can say that the mind is not affected, but deny Amo’s inference that if it is not affected it does not sense. Then the dispute is at least partly a semantic dispute about which stage of the compound process should be called “sensation”: Le Clerc and Amo agree that first our body is affected by the external sensible object and then our mind does something (perhaps “judging”) in response to that affection of the body, but Amo thinks that only the first stage is properly called sensing (because only it is an affection), while Le Clerc thinks that only the second stage is properly called sensing (because only it is a cognition, about something). Amo thinks that the second stage should rather 219 The phrase that Le Clerc uses here for the mind’s faculty of sensing, “sentiendi facultas,” is the same phrase Amo uses in the title of the Impassivity for what he claims is not in our mind but in our living and organic body. 220 Le Clerc, Pneumatologia, p.  309, says that we sense [sentire] these cognitions arising in us, whether we will or nill, on the occasion of some motions of the body: the fact that they can happen in us against our will may be evidence that they are passive. Amo quotes Le Clerc’s Physics in the Impassivity, his Pneumatologia in the Distinct Idea.

116  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations be called “understanding.” Le Clerc might reply that we can understand only atemporal truths: we can cognize that something is present to us now only through sensation. Le Clerc might also say, with Descartes, that the confused way we cognize what is happening in our bodies221 shows that this cognition is not simply intellection, but a special kind of cognition that comes with the mind-​body union, and that “sensation” is an appropriate name for that kind of cognition. Both Le Clerc and Amo will have to explain why the mind changes its state, from not-​knowing to knowing what is happening in the body and its external cause, if the body is not acting on the mind to bring about this change of state. Amo’s comments on Sennert are the only place in the dissertations where he explicitly mentions “sensible species,” and, to the extent that Amo is engaged with Sennert’s argument here, he is in contact with scholastic discussions about the causation of sensation, and in particular about whether sensible species (however they may themselves be produced) are adequate to explain sensation. Amo cites Sennert as saying “to sense is the work of the soul,” which puts Sennert on the side that Amo is opposing in the Impassivity, except that Sennert, unlike Descartes and Le Clerc, accepts distinct vegetative and sensitive and rational souls, and is attributing sensation to the sensitive soul, not to the mind. (As long as the sensitive soul is not itself a body, this is enough for Amo to be against him.) But Amo says that Sennert also “establishes the contrary of his own view”—​and supports Amo’s view—​when Sennert says that “to receive the sensible species belongs to an organ; to judge what is received belongs to the soul.” It is certainly true that Sennert, like Amo, is saying that there is a two-​stage process, the first stage (which Sennert describes as the reception of sensible species) taking place in the body and the second in the soul; so that between Amo and Sennert, as between Amo and Le Clerc, the dispute is in part semantic, about which stage is properly called sensation. But when Amo infers that Sennert is committed (despite himself) to sensation taking place in the body, this depends on the premise, which Amo states explicitly, that “to receive the sensible species is to sense,” so that if it is the bodily organ rather than the soul that receives the sensible species, it is the bodily organ rather than the soul that senses. But from Sennert’s point of view, the crucial issue is whether receiving the sensible species is indeed sufficient for sensation. Of course, in the framework 221 Indeed, when we see something, we are likely to know the external visible object much more clearly than we know what is happening in our eyes, optic nerves, and so on. Many people do not even know that they have optic nerves.

Introduction  117 of the medieval theory of sensible species, simply the presence of sensible species cannot be sufficient for sensation, since visible species of objects are present in the surrounding illuminated air, and nobody thinks that the air is seeing or sensing the objects. But many medieval philosophers, including Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, think that the presence of sensible species in an appropriate subject is sufficient to constitute sensation: on one version, that means the presence of sensible species in a sensitive soul, and on another version it means the presence of sensible species in a body informed by a sensitive soul. Since Sennert says that “to receive the sensible species belongs to an organ,” he is rejecting the idea that the species could come to be present in a soul: for him, the question would be whether their presence in a body informed by a sensitive soul is sufficient for sensation. But in fact Sennert denies that the presence of sensible species—​in a body, or in anything else if they could be present in anything else—​could be sufficient to constitute sensation. Sennert is in agreement, in this denial, with many medieval and post-​ medieval Aristotelians, who may accept that there are sensible species, and may accept that they are necessary for sensation,222 but who deny, against Albert and Thomas, that these species are sufficient for sensation. And this is not just an accidental coincidence of views between the “modern” seventeenth-​century Sennert and some dissident medievals. On the contrary, Sennert is well aware of the controversy, which philosophers kept lively throughout the sixteenth century (with constant references back to thirteenth-​and fourteenth-​century thinkers); here as on many other questions, Sennert seems to follow the view of the famous Paduan Aristotelian Jacopo (or Giacomo) Zabarella (1533–​1589).223 But, more important than 222 Not all medieval Aristotelians accept this; notably, William of Ockham does not. 223 Much has been written on Zabarella, although some of it unfortunately in a misguided attempt to show that he, and the naturalistic Padua Aristotelian school that he represents, are the source of Galileo’s scientific method. Besides PDF scans and reprints of his work, there is a modern edition of many of his writings, Giacomo Zabarella, De rebus naturalibus, ed. José Manuel García Valverde, 2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2016; also a modern edition with facing English translation of two logical texts, Jacopo Zabarella, On Methods vol. 1, and On Methods vol. 2 and On Regressus, both volumes ed. and tr. John P. McCaskey, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. On Sennert and Zabarella, see Emily Michael, “Daniel Sennert on Matter and Form: At the Juncture of the Old and the New,” Early Science and Medicine 2 (1997): 272–​99, and the references she gives. As Michael brings out, Zabarella’s opponent Julius Caesar Scaliger (the father of the great classical scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger) is also important for Sennert, but on the present issue he is following Zabarella and disagreeing with Scaliger. On sensible species and sensory cognition, Sennert is often following passages of Zabarella’s De sensu agente, pp. 981–​1008 in García Valverde (in v.2: the two volumes are paginated continuously), the edition we will cite:  we will cite relevant parallels that may have been Sennert’s sources. We cite Sennert from Daniel Sennert, Epitome Naturalis Scientiae, editio ultima, Amsterdam: Joannes Ravestein, 1651, although it is apparently not the edition Amo is using: the page

118  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations where Sennert himself comes down on the question, he is likely to be a source for Amo concerning the scholastic issues about sense-​perception. These “issues” are not simply a list of questions on which different philosophers take different stands, but include a widely shared concern about whether external bodily causes, acting indirectly on us by producing sensible species, can adequately explain our sensory cognitions. Such issues persist even if we drop the theory of sensible species and replace it by some more mechanical theory of bodily action (indeed, this may make the issues even more pressing). The same issues also persist whether (like Sennert) we insist that sensation is a kind of cognition, and conclude that it can’t be adequately explained by external bodily causes, or whether (like Amo) we insist that sensation is the effect of external bodily causes, and conclude that it can’t be a kind of cognition. Even if sensation itself is not a cognition, we certainly have cognitions that are based on and responsive to our sensations, and if these cognitions cannot be adequately explained by external bodily causes, we will have the challenge of how else to explain them. Sennert and Zabarella opt for one solution, and they also mention solutions that other philosophers had tried. Both their statements of the difficulties against a straightforward physical explanation of sensory cognition, and the possible alternatives they describe (whether they endorse them or not) may have been important for Amo. As Sennert says, “In what the essence [or definition] of sensing consists, the authorities [or authors] have taken divergent opinions, and there is no little controversy whether sensation is purely a passion, and nothing but the reception of the species of a sensible thing, or whether besides the reception of the species there is also some other action [performed] by the soul.”224 Those authors who think that the soul is purely passive in sensation (notably Thomas Aquinas, cited by Zabarella p. 1000) think that the agent or efficient cause of a sensation is the sensible object, acting by means of the species it produces, and that sensation is a reception of the sensible species, in the soul or in the soul-​body composite. Other authors, including Duns Scotus and John of Jandun (d. 1328), and Zabarella and Sennert following them, think numbers do not correspond, but the text apparently does. (By contrast, the texts Amo cites often cannot be found in the edition Wittenberg: Caspar Heiden, 1618.) 224 “In quo autem sentiendi ratio consistat, autores in diversas abierunt sententias, nec levis est controversia, An Sensio sit mera passio, nihilque aliud, quàm speciei rei sensibilis receptio: An vero praeter speciei receptionem etiam alia fiat ab anima actio” (Sennert p.  539); compare notably in Zabarella “ergo praeter receptionem speciei requiritur etiam animae actio qua species iudicetur” (p. 1005).

Introduction  119 that some other agent is needed, and usually they identify this with the soul or specifically with its power of sensation (saying either that the sensible object and the power of sensation are each partial efficient causes, or that only the power of sensation is the genuine efficient cause).225 There are two main ways that this other agent might be thought to intervene. As Sennert says, some philosophers have thought that a sensible body is insufficient to generate sensible species, and “introduce an agent sense which forms sensible species” (Sennert p. 539; Zabarella at much greater length, pp. 982–​99); and the more we think of sensible species as “spiritual” or “intentional” or as representing the object, the more we might doubt whether a physical agent is adequate to explain them. But most philosophers find it too bizarre to suppose that some active power goes out from our soul to elicit sensible species from it, and so more usually they assume that the sensible object, perhaps assisted by other physical causes (e.g., light for the production of visible species) is sufficient to produce sensible species,226 but they raise doubts as to whether the sensible species in turn is adequate to explain sensory cognition, and they argue that there must be another agent of sensory cognition, the soul acting under some description, which can be called an “agent sense” even if it is not really distinct from the passive sensory power. As Sennert says, “the sensible species, or the object emitting the sensible species, is not the agent or the active principle of sensation: for to sense is the work of the soul. . . . Nor is sensation just reception. . . . However, we should not posit 225 For the history of this discussion, from Averroes through the fourteenth century, see Stuart MacClintock, Perversity and Error: Studies in the “Averroist” John of Jandun, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956, pp. 10–​50, and the much fuller Adriaan Pattin, Pour l’histoire du sens agent: La controverse entre Barthélemy de Bruges et Jean de Jandun, ses antécédents et son evolution, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988, with many primary texts, often unavailable elsewhere. John of Jandun, unlike most other parties to the dispute, thought there was a separate “agent sense” really distinct from our passive sensory powers. 226 “Ea est natura qualitatum propriè sensibilium, hancque vim obtinent, ut se multiplicare, sui specie emissa, possint: omninoque omnes formae sui sunt multiplicativae, aliae et realiter [et] spiritaliter, aliae spiritaliter tantum. Qua ratione autem id faciant, si quis quaerat, plus respondere non possumus, quam si dicendum nobis sit, cur calor calefaciat” (Sennert p. 539). This looks like a shorter version of things Zabarella says pp. 992–​93. Zabarella says, summarizing Albert the Great and endorsing his opinion up to this point, “Inquit Albertus qualitates sensiles talem habere naturam ut multiplicent in medio speciem suam spiritalem, proinde vanum esse quaerere aliud externum agens, cum ad speciem producendama ipsaesuapte natura sufficiant. Huiusce autem rei rationem reddens Albertus dicit omnem formam esse multiplicativam sui ipsius vel realiter vel spiritaliter” (p. 992); and “vana esset quaestio cur calor alium calorem materialem producat, cum nulla huius productionis sit alia ratio quam ipsamet caloris natura, quae apta est ad alium calorem in alio generandum” (p. 993). In the context Zabarella explains the two kinds of multiplication: evidently “real” multiplication, producing a form in matter, is harder than “spiritual” multiplication, producing a form alone. For the background here in species-​theories of vision, see Lindberg’s Theories of Vision and his Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

120  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations two really distinct senses, one an agent and one a patient; rather, the same soul is said both to act and to be acted on, in different respects.” So why might a philosopher think that the species is not sufficient to explain sensory cognition? And what would soul do in producing sensation—​that is, how is the soul active as well as passive in sensation? And, if the species is not sufficient, then why is the species necessary, what does the species contribute to sensation? Not all authors who think that sensible species are inadequate to explain sensory cognition answer these questions in the same way: for instance, John of Jandun believes in a really distinct “agent sense” and Scotus and Zabarella and Sennert do not. But there are some common moves. As the phrase “agent sense [sensus agens]” suggests, our authors are often thinking of the parallel with the “agent intellect [intellectus agens]” which Aristotle introduces, apparently as part of an explanation of intellectual cognition, in De Anima III, 5. As Averroes had asked already in his commentary on the De Anima, if we need to posit an agent intellect beside the soul’s passive intellect to explain intellectual cognition, why would we not need to posit an agent sense beside our passive sensory powers to explain sensory cognition?227 Apparently the reason we need to posit an agent intellect is that our rational soul is by itself only potentially knowing or understanding each object, and that, by a general Aristotelian maxim, what is potential becomes actual only through the agency of something which is already actual. But it is not clear how much this maxim is supposed to imply. If I am by myself only potentially knowing an object X, why shouldn’t my encountering an object which is actually X be enough to make me actually know X—​why does the agent have to be, not just itself X, not just itself intelligible, but itself knowing, itself intelligent? But if this inference is legitimate, as Aristotle seems to think it is, then why shouldn’t it work equally well in the explanation of sensation? I am by myself only potentially seeing green: the analogy suggests that an actually green sensible object is not an adequate agent of my actually seeing green, that the agent must be an “agent sense” that acts on my passive sense of sight to make it actually see.

227 This is in Averroes’s Long Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (a text written in Arabic but now extant only in Latin translation), commenting on Aristotle’s De Anima II, text 60 = II, 5 417b22–​9, esp. Averroes’s lines 40–​57, p. 221 in Averrois Cordubensis, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De Anima Libros, ed. F. Stuart Crawford, Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. In Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Cordoba, Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle, ed. and tr. Richard C. Taylor with Thérèse-​Anne Druart, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009, this is pp. 171–​72, esp. p. 172.

Introduction  121 This is a good dialectical move within the Aristotelian debate, but it does not really bring out why a philosopher might think that the actually green object is not an adequate agent of my seeing green; and most philosophers except John of Jandun will deny that I have an “agent sense” really distinct from my passive senses, even when they say that my sensory power must be active as well as passive in sensation. But some other reasons that were standardly given can help us clarify why the sensible object and the species it generates were thought to be inadequate to explain sensory cognition, and how the soul’s sensory power might be both active and passive, when the usual Aristotelian view is that a power is either active or passive but not both. Sennert, after saying that the sensible species or sensible object is not the agent of sensation, says “for to sense is the work of the soul, an immanent one [i.e., produced by the soul in itself], and is not to be attributed to something external and indeed an accident [like the sensible species].”228 Sennert is not explicit about why such an attribution would be objectionable, but one reason would be that if the soul were not the agent but only a patient in sensory cognition, so that the sensible object or its species would be the agent, this agent would be inadequate to its effect because an agent must be at least as “noble” as its effect, and a bodily quality is less “noble” than a cognition: in less evaluative language, that a bodily quality is essentially directed to producing purely bodily effects, and that cognitions are beyond the realm of purely bodily effects.229 There are different ways that we could try to specify some aspect of the cognition which a species or other bodily cause would be inadequate to explain. One aspect that Sennert points to is attention: “very often, while the sensible species is received in the organ, nonetheless no sensing happens, for this reason, that the soul, attending to other things, does not cognize the sensible species.”230 This is convincing given two 228 “Species sensibilis, seu objectum speciem sensibilem emittens, non est agens vel activum sensionis principium: sentire enim est opus animae, & quidem immanens, nec rei externae & quidem accidenti tribuenda est: sed ut objectum proximum rem sensibilem sensui repraesentat & offert” (p. 540). Compare Zabarella: “Sic igitur visio est actio immanens quia recipitur in ipsomet agente, nempe in anima seu in corpore animato quatenus est animatum. Quod si nullum aliud agens haberet visio nisi materialem colorem, esset absque dubio actio transiens, quod ibi Aristoteles negat. Putat igitur causam visionis effectricem esse animam ipsam” (p. 1004). 229 “Sentienti enim facultati actio quae nobilior & praestantior est, quàm passio, deneganda non est; cùm vegetanti & accidentibus ea competat” (Sennert p. 540). Zabarella gives an argument, which he cites from John of Jandun arguing against Thomas Aquinas, whose main steps are “nobilius autem est agere, quam pati”; “illud est perfectius altero cuius perfectissima operatio est nobilior perfectissima operatione alterius”; therefore, if sensation is an action of the part of the object and a passion on the part of the sensory power, “objectum erit nobilius sensu,” which is absurd (p. 1001). 230 “Nec sensatio est tantum receptio: quod praeter alia, etiam ex eo liquet, quod saepissime, dum species sensibilis in organo recipitur, nulla tamen est sensio; ea de caussa, quia anima aliis rebus intenta, species sensibiles non cognoscit:  sed sensio etiam est quaedam actio” (Sennert p.  540).

122  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations assumptions. First, it assumes that we do not sense when we are not aware that we are sensing, or aware of the object that we are sensing, presumably because sensing is by definition a kind of awareness. Second, it assumes that at moments when only our attention is lacking, the sensible species are indeed produced in our sense-​organs just as they would be if we were actually sensing: as the parallel passage in Sennert’s source Zabarella makes clearer, the causes that would produce the species are present, and there is no obstruction, so we cannot deny that the species is present. Both Sennert and Zabarella say that what the soul adds to constitute sensation is judging, and that judging is an action rather than a passion of the soul. (Although, as they both say, it is an “immanent” action, as opposed to a “transeunt” action, which produces a change in something external: a transeunt action takes place in the object affected, but the soul’s action of judging takes place in the soul itself or in the soul-​body composite.) But then why isn’t the action of judging sufficient—​why do we also need sensible species, and why does sensation involve the soul’s being acted on or receiving, as well as its acting? Sennert says that the sensible species, rather than being the active principle of sensation, “as the proximate object [of sensation], represents and exhibits the sensible thing to the sense [i.e., to the sensory power]” (p. 540). Here, although Sennert’s immediate source may be Zabarella, he is following a widespread scholastic view, going back at least to Duns Scotus, that the function of a species is to represent an object—​where “represent X” means not “be about X” but “stand in for X in its absence”—​and distinguishes between the soul’s act of judging or cognizing and the species’s function of representing. Apparently the soul’s action of judging requires a present proximate object because it is an immanent action rather than an action going out of the subject to act on an object at a distance, and yet there cannot be action without an object: if there were not something present to the soul, there would be no content available for it to judge. For the soul to judge some object at a distance, it must first passively receive something that represents or stands in for the distant object, and the soul’s action of judging directed proximately toward the species will somehow also be ultimately Compare Zabarella: “saepe contingit ut rem coloratam ob oculos positam non videamus, quia licet fiat impressio speciei in oculo (nullo enim existente impedimento id negari non potest), attamen anima aliis rebus intenta speciem illam non iudicat. Non sola igitur speciei receptio est visio, sed etiam iudicatio, nam si sola receptio esset visio, id quod diximus evenire non deberet: ergo praeter receptionem speciei requiritur etiam animae actio qua species iudicetur, proinde neque obiectum neque eius species est causa effectrix visionis” (pp. 1004–​5).

Introduction  123 directed toward the distant object, although Sennert (unlike, for instance, Scotus), does not say much about how the relation to the distant object arises. Although Sennert says that “the same soul is said both to act and to be acted on” in sensation (p.  540), it is not strictly speaking acted on. Nor, strictly speaking, does the soul sense. Rather, the soul-​body composite, the animal, is that which senses, and the soul is that by which it senses (p. 531).231 The soul has two distinct roles in sensation: it is the primary efficient cause of sensation, and the soul is also that by which the body senses, in that the body could not be acted on by external objects so as to receive sensible species unless it was informed by the soul as its formal cause. (A body without a soul in it, although it might be affected by external objects, would not be affected by them in such a way as to enable sensation.) And so, although Sennert denies that the species are received in the soul, “inasmuch as the species is received in the organ, the soul too, which is in the organ and informs it, is also said to be acted on” (p. 540): the soul is first “passive,” as the formal cause of the organ’s receptivity, and then once the species is received the soul is active in judging.232 The species functions, not as a primary efficient cause of sensation, but as something like an occasion or an obstacle-​remover: once the species is present, the soul will judge, in 231 “Primò enim etsi sensio toti composito ex anima & corpore, puta Animali tribuatur, animalque, ut Quod, sentire dicatur: Sensio tamen animam sentientem habet pro effectore primario, corpusque ratione animae sentit, animaque dicitur sentiens, ut Quo” (Sennert p.  531). Compare Zabarella:  “Quatenus enim anima est quae iudicat et fit spiritaliter res cognita, eatenus in anima sensio fieri dicitur; sed quatenus species in oculo animato recepta est et anima quoque ipsa non extra oculum est, sed in oculo, imo est ipsa oculi forma et essentia qua oculus est oculus, eatenus in oculo fieri sensio dicitur et ipsi attribuitur; ita ut oculus dicatur sentiens ut quod, anima vero non ut quod, sed ut quo” (pp. 1006–​7). Zabarella says further down on p. 1007 that “Aristoteles, quando effectricem causam sensionis considerat, eam refert in solam animam, non in compositum animatum.” 232 “Non tamen duo sensus constituendi sunt, unus agens, alter patiens, realiter distincti:  sed eadem anima & agere & pati dicitur, diverso respectu. Anima etenim quatenus judicat & agnoscit, eatenus agere dicitur: quatenus vero species in organo recipitur, eatenus anima quoque ipsa, quae in organo est, illudque informat, pati dicitur. Quapropter recipere speciem sensibilem est organi; receptam judicare animae: quia tamen vim recipiendi species anima organo tribuit, ipsaque est ratio recipiendi, etiam passio ipsi adscribitur. Sensio itaque hoc modo fit: Species spiritales ab objecto materiali productae in organo animato recipiuntur:  Receptas deinde anima cognoscit & judicat, atque ita sentire dicitur: Denique actio in organo recipitur, totique communicatur” (Sennert pp. 540–​ 41). Zabarella says “nos enim non duos distinctos sensus ponimus, sed unum, qui et agat et patiatur diversis rationibus, et ita cognoscit” (p. 1008); he says alternatively that the sense, i.e., the sensory power, produces the sensation, and that the soul does. “Proprium enim organi officium est speciem recipere et pati, ideo anima sensibilis, quatenus dat esse organo, constituit proprium receptivum speciei sensilis, et ad hanc receptionem refertur anima ut ratio recipiendi. Facta autem receptione anima utitur organo dum speciem in eo receptam iudicat; itaque recipere est organi animati, iudicare autem est solius animae; et ratione iudicii anima dicitur agere quia nil aliud est iudicare, quam sensionem producere” (pp. 1003–​4). While the soul (or the sense-​power) can be said to be acted on, this is improper: what it really means is that it is a principle, present in the organ, of the organ’s being acted on in the way appropriate for sensation.

124  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations something like the way that a heavy body will fall toward the center of the earth once the body that was supporting it and obstructing it from falling is removed—​unless there is some other obstacle to the soul’s judging, such as its being distracted by attending to other things. When the soul judges, it is not simply making a judgment about the sensible species. At the very least, it is judging that the sensible species is in conformity with an external sensible object, and so it is also judging about the external sensible object. The species is supposed to represent or stand in for the object in such a way that it will allow us to make a judgment about the object. But Scotus and many other scholastics think that, if the species in the medium and in the organ are produced by a purely physical process of multiplication of species (without the soul intervening, e.g., by acting on the object to elicit the species, which almost no one believes), then they will not be adequate to explain this aboutness of sensation. If my cognition is caused by a species in my sense-​organ which is caused by a species in the part of the medium adjoining my body, which is caused by species further away in the medium, which are ultimately caused by the distant sensible object, then why wouldn’t my cognition just be about the species which caused it, namely the species in my organ? If the answer is that the species in my organ represents something, why wouldn’t it just represent its cause, namely the species in the adjoining part of the medium? Although this is sometimes used as an argument that representational realism entails scepticism, it is fundamentally an argument about the need for an adequate explanation of cognition: the aboutness of cognition is a fact, and a series of physical causal relationships, in which each thing causes something spatially located immediately next to it, is inadequate to explain this aboutness.233 (Saying that all of the species are qualitatively similar, or that the species in the medium and in the senses and in the intellect are progressive dematerializations of the object, will not solve the problem. A dematerialized version of X is not therefore about X: notably,

233 This argument is for instance in Peter John Olivi (d. 1298), cited and discussed by Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics 1250–​1345, Leiden: Brill, 1988, p. 44 n51. Tachau gives a full discussion of the texts in Scotus among others. An argument of this kind is already in Plotinus Enneads IV.7.7, arguing against Stoic theories (and literalist interpretations of Plato’s Timaeus) which explain perception by the transmission of an affection from one part of the soul to the next until it reaches the ruling part. Sextus Empiricus argues that the mind would be blocked from directly perceiving an external sensible body by a representation of it in the senses, Adversos Mathematicos VII, 352–​53, with continuing discussion through VII, 358 (English translation in Sextus Empiricus: Against the Logicians, ed. and tr. Richard Bett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 69 and continuing through p. 71).

Introduction  125 the species in the medium, if produced by a purely physical process, are not about the object that caused them.) Scotus tries to explain the aboutness of sensory cognition by saying that the cause (a partial efficient cause, together with the soul) is the external sensible object itself. Against the common view that a body cannot act on a distant object, Scotus says that when the distant sensible object acts on us, there is also a proximate cause acting on us which is in direct contact with us, but that the action of the distant cause is not fully exhausted by the action of the chain of intermediate causes, and that the proximate cause without the distant cause is not adequate to explain the effect.234 Indeed, Scotus says that strictly speaking the sensible species is not a cause of the cognition, rather both the species and the cognition are effects of the sensible object, although the species is a prior effect, in such a way that the posterior effect would not be produced if the prior effect had not also been produced:235 perhaps the species as proximate “cause” is an instrument disposing the soul to receive the action of the distant sensible object. So if we are willing to take Scotus’s view that a body can act on a distant object (although not without a chain of subordinate non-​distant causes), we might be able to give a bodily cause of sensory cognition that will explain its aboutness. Seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century philosophers committed to a mechanist account of bodily action, on which bodies act only by contact, will inherit Scotus’s problem without being able to accept Scotus’s solution. They might reject the talk of sensible species, and speak instead of a mechanical communication of motion from the external sensible object, but this will 234 Scotus gives a good discussion of causes acting on distant objects in Ordinatio II, d.9, QQ1–​ 2, in Ioannis Duns Scoti, Opera omnia, v.8, Ordinatio, liber secundus, a distinctione quarta ad quadrigesimam quartam, ed. Barnabas Hechich et al., auctoritate Jacobi Bini, Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2001, paragraphs 53–​62, pp. 158–​63. The principle that Scotus accepts in most cases is that “a distant object cannot act on a distant object unless it first acts on what is in between [or ‘on the medium’]” (paragraph 53, p. 158—​“first” by priority in nature, not necessarily by priority in time), but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also act on the distant object. And Scotus says that sometimes the distant cause acts on the distant object and on what is in between in different manners (paragraph 55, p. 159): in particular, a visible object acts in one manner in producing a species in the medium and in another manner in producing vision in the organ of vision (paragraph 60, p. 162). He also admits cases (although not of sensation) where a cause acts on a distant object without there also being a proximate cause in contact with the object (as in the bizarre case of one angel “speaking” to another, his official topic here), except by the “virtual” contact that even a distant cause would have with its object. 235 Ibid., paragraph 61, p. 163. Scotus also says that a light-​source or a color immediately produces its species everywhere in the medium, rather than producing the species in one part which produces the species in the next part, and so on (ibid., d.13, pp. 227–​41, esp. paragraphs 31–​2, pp. 237–​38). So the species in the different parts of the medium too are ordered as prior and posterior effects of the same cause, rather than as a chain of causes and effects: perhaps this allows them to be species of or about the light-​source or the color. None of this will be acceptable on an early modern anti-​ Aristotelian conception of physical causation.

126  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations not make the problem any easier: replacing sensible species with a communication of motion makes it even more obvious that the physical effect of the sensible object will not be about its cause. Whether we say with most authors that the sensation is the sensory cognition in the soul, or with Amo that the sensation is an event in the body, the problem of explaining the aboutness of sensory cognition will remain. Descartes in the sixth Meditation proposes that God or nature sets us up in such a way that a motion in the pineal gland causes or occasions in the mind not a sensory idea of that motion in the pineal gland, but a sensory idea of whatever type of object or event, internal or external to our body, most frequently causes that motion in the pineal gland, in such a way that it would be most useful for the preservation of our mind-​body union if we thought of that object or event whenever the pineal gland is moved in that way. For Descartes, God is setting up a conventional sign-​system in which certain motions in the pineal gland will be signs of certain objects and will lead us to think about them.236 Many philosophers, then and now, would be unhappy with a proposal that the aboutness of our sensory cognitions arises from an arbitrary divine convention, even one practically directed toward our preservation. But at least it is a proposal. We now turn to see how Amo handles the problem. 6.2.  Amo on How the Mind Operates: The Theory of Intentions To recapitulate: Amo has shown what the mind does not do in sensation: it is not acted on by the sensible body, and it does not receive a sensible species or representation of the body. He needs to give a positive account of what the mind does do, because even if we reserve the name “sensation,” as Amo does, for what happens in the body, the mind certainly does something in response to sensation. The mind has cognitions of sensible things, and these cognitions would not happen without sensations and must somehow respond to the sensations; and the mind also sometimes acts in such a way as 236 Descartes speaks in various passages, especially in the first chapter of Le Monde (AT XI, 3–​6), of movments in our body as conventional signs of something to our mind, i.e., as triggering the mind to think about some object which has no intrinsic resemblance with the motion that signifies it. In the sixth Meditation he speaks of a motion in the body “giving a sign to the mind to sense something” (AT VII, 88), and goes on to speak of motions in a particular part of the body (namely the pineal gland) being systematically correlated with ideas in the mind in the way most useful for our preservation. It is not obvious at first sight that this passage is using “sign” in a technical way, but when it is juxtaposed with the texts in Le Monde and elsewhere in Desartes it seems clear that that is indeed his intention. See John W. Yolton, “Perceptual Cognition of Body in Descartes,” Chapter 1 of his Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, and Andrew Chignell, “Descartes on Sensation: A Defense of the Semantic-​Causation Model,” Philosophers’ Imprint 9 (2009): n.5, pp. 1–​22.

Introduction  127 to move its body, and sometimes also to act on external bodies, in response to sensations (as when we appropriately move toward or away from some object, or shape an appropriate raw material into an artifact). Amo accepts the views of Zabarella and Sennert, and in another way of Leibniz, that an external physical cause can’t explain sensory cognition: sensory cognition can’t happen in the body (sensation does, for Amo, but it is not a kind of cognition), and it also can’t be produced in the mind by the body. The question, then, is how else the mind’s activity in sensory cognition is to be described and explained. Amo also has the particular problem of explaining how whatever the mind does in response to sensation can have an effect on the body, since his arguments that the body cannot act on the mind (since it cannot act on it by contact, penetration, or communication) seem at first sight to be equally arguments that the mind cannot act on the body. And yet Amo will insist, against Leibniz and Malebranche, that the mind does act on the body and cause changes in the body. Sennert says, following Zabarella, that the soul judges in response to the reception of a sensible species in the sense-​organ. For Zabarella and Sennert, it is this judging that properly constitutes sensation. Amo reserves the name “sensation” for what happens in the sense-​organ (which he does not, except when he is quoting Sennert, describe as the reception of a sensible species), but he might still follow Sennert in describing the soul’s sensory cognition as an act of judging in response to what happens in the sense-​organ. But this would not solve the problem: judging what? We cannot make a judgment unless we cognize the judgeable content, and how, for Amo, do we do that? The usual early modern answer is that what we judge is an idea, or several ideas combined into a proposition, and that some of these ideas may be innate (implanted in the mind by God), while others are acquired passively by sensation. But Amo denies that the mind can be acted on in sensation, and (perhaps surprisingly) he also denies that we have innate ideas. If we accepted a scholastic theory of sensible species, it might be easier to suppose that what happens in the organ (namely, the sensible species received there) is about something other than itself, which could give us content for judging. But for Amo, sensation (what happens in the organ) is simply a mechanical being-​affected, by contact or penetration or communication, by an external object: it is no more about its cause than the earth’s being warmed by the sun is about the sun. Amo places the mind’s distinctive contribution to sensory cognition, not in judgment, but in a mental act that bestows aboutness on sensation, that interprets a sensation as being

128  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations about some object: this is what Amo technically calls an “intention.” And since Amo thinks that all human cognitions (all cognitions of spirits united to bodies, as opposed to God’s or an angel’s cognitions) depend ultimately on our cognitive responses to sensations, and since all other human mental acts (volition and action on the body) depend on cognitions, he takes “intention” as essential to all our mental activity. He introduces this theme in the Impassivity, applies it in the Distinct Idea, and makes “intention” the core technical notion of the Tractatus. Amo defines the human mind as “a purely active and immaterial substance which, by commerce with the living and organic body in which it is present, understands and operates from intention on account of a determinate end of which it is conscious” (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1). This definition is supposed to contain in kernel the whole theory of the human mind, and to give guidelines for when some act can be attributed to the mind (rather than to the body, or to some other kind of spirit). It involves several terms that will need to be unpacked carefully, including “intention,” “end” and “conscious.” But the first thing to notice is that Amo is starting from his earlier definition of spirit, and specializing to the case of the human mind. What he adds that is distinctive of the human mind as opposed to other spirits, is that its operations depend on commerce with the living and organic body in which it is present—​and he means that all of its operations depend on its commerce with the body in one way or another. (Amo says that the mind’s commerce with the body consists in its using the body “as the subject in which it is present” and “as an instrument and medium of its operation,” Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §3, Note 1; we will come back to these notions.) To concentrate on the intellect or understanding, since all other mental acts depend on this:  Amo says that in every act of intellect the mind becomes conscious either of a sensation or of some further thing” (Distinct Idea, Chapter  1, Member 2, Section 1, §1, Note). But if we become conscious of some further “thing,” it always stands in some relation to our sensations—​other spirits may be conscious of things independently of their sensations, but human minds are not. Amo cites from Melanchthon, and endorses: “Nothing is in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.”237 237 See our footnote to the translation of Distinct Idea, Chapter  1, Member 2, Section 1, §1, Note, Reason, with references to Melanchthon’s and other uses of this formula. As we note there, Melanchthon in fact expresses reservations about this formula, but Amo suppresses them. Amo asserts the same formula in his own voice at Tractatus, General Part, Chapter I, Member VI, Observation, Demonstration II, p. 11.

Introduction  129 And he explains: “That is: nothing is in the mind’s act of understanding that had not previously been perceived by the senses. But nothing is perceived that does not affect the senses, and everything that affects the senses is a sensible thing, namely matter” (Distinct Idea, Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 1, §1, Reason). This would work to explain intellectual cognition on an empiricist theory where the senses can perceive something which the mind can also cognize, and where the senses can act on the mind in such a way as to transmit their cognitive content to the mind. Alternatively, perhaps it is not the senses themselves that act on the mind, but something else, and this agent might transmit to the mind not everything that the senses perceive, but only some intelligible core content within the senses’ perceptions: thus Melanchthon is cautiously willing to take up the traditional language of the “agent intellect” abstracting from phantasms (Melanchthon, De Anima p. 126 verso).238 But for Amo, there is nothing that can act on the mind. And for Amo it is not correct to say that the senses can perceive something or be about some content. As we have said, a sensation for Amo is a purely physical process produced in the human body by some external physical cause, and is not about that cause any more than the earth’s being warmed by the sun is about the sun. And if it were about its cause, it would be indeterminate what cause it would be about—​why would a visual sensation in our body be more a sensation of some particular object at a distance than of its immediate cause in the air next to the eye (a visible species or light-​particles or a light-​wave or whatever it may be), or its indirect cause in the air a bit further away, and so on? When Amo speaks, paraphrasing Melanchthon, of the thing that affects the senses being “perceived by the senses,” he probably means not precisely that the senses perceive this thing, but that the mind perceives it by the senses:239 but, again, the question is how a sensation allows the mind to perceive some particular external cause of that sensation.

238 But Melanchthon takes the agent intellect, not to be something external, but to be the mind’s power of discovering [invenire] something new, by compounding or dividing or inferring or grasping the cause of something, whereas the passive intellect is what discerns the truth (or otherwise) of the discoveries proposed to it by the agent intellect: so De Anima p. 125 verso–​p. 127 verso, esp. p. 125 verso–​p. 126 recto. When the agent intellect abstracts from a phantasm (p. 126 verso), it would typically be grasping something as the cause of what the senses communicate to it, e.g., when we go from seeing the moon’s phases to grasping that its side facing the sun is illuminated. Melanchthon’s examples are typically from rhetoric, in odd contrast with the very abstract philosophical text he is trying to explain. 239 Amo says that the thing is perceived “sensibus,” a bare noun in the ablative without a preposition. This is probably an ablative of means, with the implied agent being the mind: so “what the mind perceives by the senses.”

130  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Amo says that in cases where the mind is conscious not (or not only) of the sensation itself, but of what affects the senses, the mind is taking the sensation, or the bodily organ in which the sensation occurs, as a medium or means, and taking the efficient cause of the sensation, typically an external body, as the end of which we are conscious. This is an application of his theory of intentions: as we have seen, the human mind “understands and operates from intention on account of a determinate end of which it is conscious” (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1). More generally, an intention is a mental state or operation which relates the mind to some end, and every operation which can be attributed to the human mind or to any other spirit takes place through such an intention: thus end-​relatedness is essential to mental activity, and it is this end-​relatedness which is supposed to explain how a sensation gives rise to a perceptual cognition directed to some external object. Amo says in general that “a spirit operates from an intention, i.e., from a precognition of a thing that is supposed to come about, and of an end that it intends to attain through its operation: for in this consists the nature of the operation of an entity operating rationally and from understanding” (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Explanation 4 with its Reason). The language of “an end that [the spirit] intends to attain” makes it sound as if an “end” here will be an Aristotelian final cause, and would be relevant only in explaining practical activity, not cognition. But this is not Amo’s view: he thinks that cognition too must be intentional, thus must be end-​directed, and he is not trying to reduce it to practical activity. We have cited him as saying that the mind uses the body “as the subject in which it is present” and “as an instrument and medium of its operation” (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §3, Note 1). “Instrument” and “medium” are not the same thing: “instrument and medium differ in that an instrument is applied to attaining an end practically, while a medium is used to attain an end theoretically” (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §3, Note 2). So when I use some part of my body to move toward something so that I can take it for myself, or to act on something to get it into a state I want it to be in, or to eat or drink something, then I am using that part of my body as an instrument for attaining some end practically, the more usual sense of “attaining some end”; but when I use some part of my body as a sense-​organ, I am using it as a medium for attaining some end theoretically, i.e., for acquiring knowledge of something.240 So an 240 Amo’s distinction between “instrument” and “medium” is a bit peculiar. Aristotle distinguishes between the instrument and the medium, e.g., of seeing or of hearing, but in this context the “instrument” is the sense-​organ proper (the word “organ” is just a borrowing into Latin and the modern

Introduction  131 “end,” for Amo, does not have to be something we aim at practically, something we want to acquire or to do or produce: it can also be something we aim at theoretically, something we want to know. And nothing, except perhaps our sensations, is simply given to us to know: we can know anything beyond our sensations only if we want to know it, only if we expend some effort in its direction—​and such an expenditure of effort toward something will, when properly explained, be what Amo means by an “intention,” either practical or theoretical. Amo officially defines an “end” as “that which, when it is gained and present, the spirit, ceasing from its former operation, comes to rest” (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note 3): this is deliberately neutral between practical and theoretical ends, and it avoids defining ends in terms of the spirit’s desiring the end or taking the end as good, so that desire and other mental states, both practical and theoretical, can be defined without circularity in terms of ends. In particular, intentions, which are the fundamental kind of mental state, are defined in terms of ends: “by intention we understand that operation of the spirit by which it becomes conscious of something [sibi aliquid notum facit] which, if it is carried out, an end would follow” (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note 2); or, in the parallel definition in the Tractatus, “intention in general is that faculty of an intelligent substance by which it determines things it knows [res cognitas] as to be done, or to be omitted, on account of an end of which it is conscious [propter sibi conscium finem]” (General Part, Chapter I, Member II, §1, pp. 2–​3).241 This definition, and perhaps especially languages of the Greek word for “instrument”), although in some cases it is not the obvious sense-​ organ but something closer to the center of the body, while the obvious sense-​organ is merely a medium (Aristotle says that flesh is only a medium of the sense of touch, whose real organ is the heart). But Amo’s calling all the sense-​organs media is peculiar. Perhaps Amo’s thought is that the so-​called sense-​organs are ultimately media, not between some inward part of our body and the external sensible object, but between our mind and the external sensible object. So there is no distinction between the species in the medium and the species in the sense-​organ: the species in the so-​called sense-​organ is just the species in another part of the medium, and its reception in the so-​called sense-​organ no more constitutes cognition than its reception in the surrounding air does. 241 Amo says that he uses “A understands B” and “A becomes conscious [conscius] of B” as equivalent (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note 1); he also says, equivalently, “A makes B conscium to itself [i.e., to A]” (Distinct Idea, Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 1, §1 and also its attached Note.) Once in the dissertations he says instead “A makes B known [notum] to itself [i.e., to A],” Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note 2), apparently with the same meaning (although this phrase could mean “A does B, which is something known to itself [i.e., to A]”). The Latin adjective conscius, like the German adjective bewust (in twenty-​first-​century spelling bewusst) which Amo uses as equivalent, can modify either the knowing subject A or the object B, meaning in either case that A is aware of B. See our note in the translation at Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note 2. In Distinct Idea, Chapter 1, Member 1, §2 and Chapter 2, Member 1, Thesis, Amo uses the German word “Bewust-​ Werdung” (“becoming conscious”) to gloss the Latin “conscientia.”

132  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations the Tractatus version, sounds as if it is describing just practical intentions, but Amo is clear that this is not what he means. As he says a few pages further on in the Tractatus, “some intentions of our mind are cognoscitive, others effective” (General Part, Chapter I, Member IV, §1, p. 9; already at Member III, §1, p. 6, cognoscitive intentions produce entia rationis while effective intentions produce real beings).242 In both cases we start from some sort of directedness toward a (practical or theoretical) “end.” The Tractatus definition specifies that we must be conscious of this end:243 certainly we do not have to know it in detail already at this stage, but we must be capable of directing some activity toward it, in such a way that that activity will come to rest if it attains that end. Starting by being in some such way conscious of the end, we become conscious of something else as related to that end: perhaps we become conscious of this thing when otherwise we would not have been, or perhaps we were already conscious of the thing, but we become conscious of how it is related to this end. Most straightforwardly, in the practical case, we start by being conscious of some end that we want to accomplish, and then we become conscious of something that we can do in order to accomplish that end. This yields something like Aristotle’s description of practical reasoning, where we begin from the end to be accomplished and reason step-​by-​step backwards to the means to that end, until we reach a means that is within our power, and then we act: the last step in the reasoning will be the first step in the action, and the final result of our action (if the action if successful) will be the thing from which we began the process of reasoning. If an intention is genuinely practical, it leads us not simply from consciousness of a practical end to knowledge of a means, but to action: we come to know some means as “to be done” in order to attain that end, and we therefore do it. In the Distinct Idea Amo distinguishes three species of operations of the mind: understanding, willing, and “the mind’s act of effecting, or effective act” (Chapter 1, Member 1, §3, and Member 2), i.e., “that by which the mind,

242 Amo’s language here seems to be unusual for his time and place. “Intentio” in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century German Latin philosophical texts is often used equivalently to German “Absicht,” meaning a purpose or final cause: it does not seem to be standardly used in the more general sense of “intentional state” or “intentional content,” although there are scholastic precedents for these uses. We are not sure whether Amo is innovating or following someone on the terminology of intentio. From Amo’s descriptions of intentio he seems to regard it as something that most obviously happens in practical cases: he wants to establish the less obvious claim that it is also necessary for theoretical cognition. 243 Likewise, as we have seen, a spirit “understands and operates from intention on account of a determinate end of which it is conscious [propter . . . sibi conscium finem]” (Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1).

Introduction  133 by means of its commerce with the body and of the means it employs [mediis adhibitis], intends to attain something as an end” (Member 2, Section 3).244 This is supposed to fall under the general definition of an operation of the mind as “an act of the mind with consciousness and intention, of thinking through ideas and sensations, and of verifying the things that are thought” (Chapter  1, Member 1, §2). That may sound exclusively theoretical, but only because we are used to taking “verifying” to mean becoming sure that something is true, or finding out whether something is true; but Amo seems to take “verifying” in its etymological sense of making something true. He says “By ‘verification’ I  understand attaining the end that we intend from the means employed [adhibitis mediis consequi finem quem intendimus]” (Chapter 1, Member 1, §2, Explanation 1). “From the means employed” is the same phrase (with a word-​order switch that doesn’t affect the meaning) as “[by means] of the means it employs” in the definition of the mind’s effective act. And although the infinitive ‘consequi’ is grammatically ambiguous, here as in several other passages in Amo, between an intransitive verb “to result, to come about” (with “end” as its subject) and a transitive verb “to pursue, to attain” (with “end” as its object),245 Amo probably means that when I verify something, I am bringing about the end that I intend, or at least acting with the aim of bringing it about. So when Amo says that an operation of the mind is “an act of the mind with consciousness and intention, of thinking through ideas and sensations, and of verifying the things that are thought,” the “verifying” clause either refers just to the effective act, or at least 244 Amo discusses these three kinds of operations of the mind again in Tractatus, General Part, Chapter V, sometimes with close verbal parallels with the Distinct Idea. Amo says at Distinct Idea, Chapter 1, Member 1, §3, Note 1, that “this threefold act of the mind is numerically as well as specifically one, but it receives at least relative differences from its object and its end.” Apparently this means that one and the same mental act can be simultaneously an act of understanding, of willing, and of effecting. There is no intrinsic quality that, say, all acts of understanding have and all acts of willing lack; what makes an act an act of understanding is not that it has a certain intrinsic quality but that it is related to a certain kind of object or a certain kind of end. Perhaps the intellectual judgment “X is the appropriate thing to do,” the volition to do X, and the “effective act” executing this volition by appropriate motions of the bodily organs, are numerically the same act, but because this act has different relations to different objects and ends, it judges one thing, wills another, and executes a third. Amo denies that the mind undergoes intrinsic, non-​relational changes (that seems to be the point, in context, of the Corollary at the end of the Distinct Idea): if I go, e.g., from not understanding X to understanding X, it is not because I have acquired a new quality but because of changes in external things (including my body) to which my mind is somehow related. See Section 6.3. 245 Amo uses forms of the verb consequi at Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note 2; Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Explanations 3 and 4; Chapter 1, Member 1, §3, Note 2; Distinct Idea, Chapter 1, Member 1, §2, Explanation 1; Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 2, §1; Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 3; and Chapter 2, Member 2, §4, Explanation. In all eight occurrences finis is the subject or object of the verb. At some places in the translation we have notes on the construal issues. In the first occurrence in the Impassivity and the last occurrence in the Distinct Idea finis must grammatically be the subject.

134  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations applies in the strongest and most direct way to the effective act rather than to understanding and willing. When he says “by the means employed,” in the definition of verification as in the definition of the mind’s effective act, “means” (medium) must not be medium in the narrow sense as opposed to “instrument,” a medium of sensation as opposed to an instrument of action, but must include instruments of action, which we use to “verify” or bring about the end we intend. We will come back to problems in Amo’s explanation of the mind’s action on the body: for now, we just note that instead of looking for some “interface” (like the Cartesian pineal gland) where the mind can initiate motion in the body, Amo starts with the final cause, the end that we intend, and works backward from the end to the means which we become conscious of through our intention, and which we therefore bring about. In starting the explanation of the mind’s actions through their final causes Amo is close to Leibniz. But he wants not to accept Leibniz’s conclusion that minds are not genuine efficient causes of motions in bodies, and his problem will be how to avoid this. Amo seems to take this account of practical intentions and the mind’s effective act as a model for his account of theoretical intentions and the act of understanding. In both cases we start by being conscious of the end, and, through an operation of intending, become conscious of something else as related to that end. In both cases what we become conscious of is some motion in our own body. In the practical case it is a voluntary motion which can produce the intended end. In the theoretical case it is a sensation produced in our body by the intended external object. Perhaps we would not have become aware of this motion in our body if we were not directed toward the external object. Or perhaps we would have been aware of it, but would not have been aware of its relation to the external object. Amo does not seem to think that a sensation, in itself, would be sufficient to make us aware of the external object: this is his version of the claim we have seen in some scholastics and in Sennert, that the sensible species is insufficient to explain sensory cognition. Where some scholastics think the missing explanatory factor is the external object itself working directly on the sensitive soul, and others think it is something like an “agent sense” or an act of judgment, Amo invokes instead the mind’s operation of intending and so becoming conscious of a means. The motion in the sense-​organ is a “means” or “medium” between the mind and the external sensible object, not just because it is caused in our body by the external object, but because “if it is carried out, an end would follow” (from the definition of intention cited earlier, Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1,

Introduction  135 Note 2)—​not, as in the practical case, that we would produce the end, but that we would come to know it. As Amo has said, for a human mind (by contrast with God or an angel) “nothing is in the mind’s act of understanding that had not previously been perceived by the senses,” and “nothing is perceived that does not affect the senses” (Distinct Idea, Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 1, §1, Reason). But what is “perceived by the senses”—​that is, perceived by the mind by means of the senses—​is not simply given with the sensation, i.e., with the motion in the sense-​organ. Rather, the mind uses the sensation, the motion in the sense-​organ, as a means for coming to know the external object which causes this motion. If an external object had no such causal connection with our body, we would be unable to know it: this is a cognitive limitation characteristic of human minds as opposed to other spirits. But given that the object causes some motion in our body, we can use that effect in our body as the starting point for knowing its external cause. Amo says that sometimes, in the “momentary intellective act,” the mind uses an idea to “attend to” a present sensible object or to “represent” an absent sensible object (Tractatus, General Part, Chapter V, Member II, §§2–​ 3, p. 46—​it can then combine ideas to form propositions about the object), whereas at other times, in “reflection” or the “reflexive intellective act,” “the mind inquires into the thing’s existence, origin and nature” (Member III, §1, p. 47).246 “Attending to” and “representing” both come ultimately from the scholastic discussions of acts of cognition and the role of species. Those scholastics who say that species in the organ or the sensitive soul are insufficient for cognition typically say that we also need to attend to the object; even scholastics who say that species are insufficient for cognition, and even those who say that species are unnecessary in the intuitive cognition of a present singular object, usually say that a species is necessary to “represent” an absent object (whether distant or past or future or non-​existent), to serve in its stead as the immediate terminus of the act of cognition. But for Amo both attending and representing are ways the mind uses the sensation, things that the sensation itself, being merely a motion in the body, is unable to do—​the sensation has no resemblance to the external object that might allow it to 246 Amo takes up the discussion of the mind’s momentary and reflexive acts again in the Special Part of the Tractatus: Section I of the Special Part is on the mind’s momentary intellective act prior to reflection, Section II is on the reflexive act, and Section III is on the effects of reflection, including momentary acts subsequent to reflection. He speaks about attention and representation specifically in Section I, Chapter I, Member II. Amo also gives a brief version of the distinction between momentary and reflexive acts of intellection (and, within the momentary acts, between pre-​reflexive and post-​reflexive acts) in Distinct Idea, Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 1, §§2–​4; see Section 6.3..

136  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations represent the object, and while it is caused by the object, it is also caused by a lot of intermediate things, and the sensation by itself does not represent one cause any more than it represents the others. But the mind can either make implicit use of the causal relation in order to attend to, represent, and make judgments about the object, or it can think explicitly about the causal relation itself, using the effect in our body to “inquire into the thing’s existence, origin and nature.” This language seems to mirror what Amo has said just two pages earlier in the Tractatus about the mind’s effective act, “that faculty of the mind by whose mediation, when the means are applied [adhibitis mediis], the things that are thought obtain actual origin, existence and essence” (General Part, Chapter V, Member I, §14, p. 45). In the case of the effective act, motions in our bodily organs are causes of external objects, while in the case of intellection, the external objects produce the motions in our bodily organs; in both cases the mind directs its organs toward the external intended end, in one case using the organs to actually produce the external objects, in the other case using them to know the external objects. Amo’s way of thinking about the sources of the aboutness of our sensory cognitions (which is also his way of thinking about the aboutness of our volitions and actions, all derived from an intended end) contrasts notably with Descartes’s, described earlier, where a particular type of motion in the body (specifically, a particular type of motion in the pineal gland) regularly triggers an idea with a particular content. Descartes agrees with Amo, and with the scholastic critics of species-​theories of cognition, that the effect of the external object on our body is insufficient in itself to generate the content of the sensory cognition. Descartes’s solution is to have God institute correlations between motions in the body (in the pineal gland) and sensory ideas in the mind, correlations which are arbitrary in the sense that the bodily motion and the idea have no shared content, but which tend overall to help preserve the human being as a mind-​body composite. For Amo, Descartes’s mistake, in explaining sensation as in explaining voluntary action, is to look for something like an “interface” between mind and body, across which one of them can act on the other, at least with divine assistance, by something analogous to “contact, penetration or communication.” Amo takes the mind to be what acts in both cases, and he tries to explain its activity starting from the end to which it directs itself, not from what it most immediately produces. Without believing in a distinct “agent intellect” or “agent sense,” he takes the mind to be active in interpreting our sensations as being about something that they can help us to know: sensations are not

Introduction  137 intrinsically about, but acquire aboutness through the mind’s act of directing them to some object of which it is already confusedly aware, and which it wishes to know more distinctly.247 At least that is the program. We may be dissatisfied with Amo’s account of the previous consciousness of the end or object, which is apparently required before we can have an intellection or volition or effective act directed toward it. We may also wonder about the consciousness of the means that we are supposed to acquire through the intention: when I look at a tree, I am conscious of the tree, and perhaps I am conscious of my consciousness of the tree, but am I conscious of my sensation of the tree, i.e., of the motions of light and animal spirits in my eyes and optic nerve and brain? Certainly I am not distinctly aware of what is going on in my body in sensation (most people have never heard of the optic nerve or the animal spirits), or likewise in voluntary motion. Perhaps it can be said that we are indistinctly aware that something is happening in our bodies in sensation or voluntary motion, less distinctly than we are aware of the external end or object. To take the example of practical action, the fact that we are conscious of the end, and the fact that certain actions would accomplish that end, must be explanatory of our performing those actions, but we may not ourselves be conscious of all the particular motions of the animal spirits necessary for performing the actions. Malebranche and Arnauld use our ignorance of the motions of the animal spirits in our body to argue that, since the mind must cause whatever it causes by thinking, and so must be conscious of whatever it does, the mind cannot be the genuine efficient cause of voluntary motions in the body (rather, it gives the occasion for God to move the body);248 Amo agrees that 247 It is worth noting that Amo devotes Tractatus, Special Part, Section III, Chapter VIII, to “the art of criticism, hermeneutics, and method,” and Members IV-​V of this chapter specifically to “the art of interpretation or hermeneutics.” Criticism (i.e., the investigation of the authenticity of texts attributed to a given author, and correction of mistakes in the transmitted text) and hermeneutics had not been standard parts of logic, but were starting to become so in Amo’s time. One person who is often seen as a pioneer here is Johann Martin Chladni or Chladenius, who took a Master’s degree in philosophy at Wittenberg in October 1731, one year after Amo, and subsequently taught there (as did Amo) before moving to the University of Leipzig (as Amo to Halle). It would be worth exploring the relations between Amo and Chladenius. In Tractatus, Special Part, Section IV, Chapter III, on the duties of different parties in a disputation, Amo refers back to the “rules of interpretation” as guiding the disputers in interpreting the thesis (Member IV, §1, p. 203). 248 For discussion of this argument in Malebranche and in the earlier Cartesian occasionalist Arnold Geulincx see Steven Nadler, “Knowledge, Volitional Agency, and Causation in Malebranche and Geulincx,” Chapter 4 of his Occasionalism; and for Arnauld, Nadler’s “Dualism and Occasionalism:  Arnauld and the Development of Cartesian Metaphysics,” Chapter  5 in Occasionalism. Arnauld makes this argument particularly in his Dissertation sur la manière dont Dieu a fait les fréquents miracles de l’Ancienne Loi par le ministère des Anges, in Oeuvres de messire Antoine Arnauld, v.38, Paris: d’Arnay, 1780, pp. 690–​91; he says there that we (or those of us who are saved) will be able to move our bodies on the day of resurrection, when we will know everything that

138  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations the mind causes motion by thinking, but in the first instance by thinking its intended end, not by thinking (say) a turning of the pineal gland which it can use to send the animal spirits off in a different direction. Again, we may not be satisfied that Amo’s explanation—​or rather his program of explanation, for he does not pretend to have given us the details—​ really works. It is surely right, in explaining voluntary action, to begin from the intended end rather than from the means or instruments, and perhaps it is right to extend that approach also to explaining sensory cognition (and other cognitions derived from sensory cognition, which for Amo is all human cognitions). But, we may think, if the mind is non-​bodily and is to act on the body, or notice things in the body, there must be a causal interface somewhere, unless we are to deny real mind-​body causality, and opt either for occasionalism with Malebranche or for pre-​established harmony with Leibniz. It is clear that Amo does not want to do either of those things; and, if the difficulty is that his arguments against the body acting on the mind would also show that the mind cannot act on the body, it will not help for him to say that it is only God who acts directly on bodies (at every instant as for Malebranche, or in imposing laws and initial conditions as for Leibniz), since the same argument that shows that a finite spirit cannot act on a body would also show that God cannot act on a body (God certainly does not act on a body by contact, penetration or communication). As we’ve noted before, Amo neither endorses any of the three standard “systems” of mind-​body commercium, nor gives a clear alternative answer in the terms in which his contemporaries were posing the question: it is easier to say what he is against than what he is for. As we will see, the Distinct Idea suggests at least the outlines of an alternative solution. But first some reflections on the consequences of the argument of the Impassivity will help to get into focus how he seems to be thinking about the problem. Amo clearly rejects occasionalism and pre-​established harmony, since he thinks that both God and finite spirits produce real effects in bodies. As he says in the Tractatus, “the effect of a cognoscitive intention is an ens rationis, of an effective [intention] a real being” (General Part, Chapter I, is going on in our bodies, and that perhaps our ancestors did so in the Garden of Eden. Arnauld raises the difficulty about how the mind can cause motions in the body without knowing them already in a letter to Descartes from July 1648, AT V, 211–​18, this passage V, 214–​15. This letter is v.2, Letter 5 in the Amsterdam edition of Descartes’s letters that Amo cites (which here follows, as usual, Clerselier’s numbering in his edition of the letters): Clerselier and the Amsterdam edition, unlike Adam and Tannery, print this letter as an anonymous letter to Descartes. Amo quotes an earlier passage of this same letter at Distinct Idea, Chapter 2, Member 2, §4; see our note to the translation there.

Introduction  139 Member III, §1, p. 6); he goes on to specify that God’s intentions always produce real beings, never mere entia rationis, and that some human intentions produce real beings, others entia rationis (General Part, Chapter I, Member III, §§1-​2, pp. 6-​7). When Amo argues in the Impassivity that bodies cannot act on spirits because they cannot act on them by contact, penetration, or communication, this looks as if it would also be an argument that spirits cannot act on bodies, since it is equally true (for basically the same reasons) that a spirit cannot act on a body by contact, penetration or communication; but this cannot be what Amo intends. He must mean, not that nothing can act except by contact, penetration, or communication, but that bodies cannot act except by contact, penetration or communication; these are the distinctive ways that bodies act, whereas spirits act instead by intentions. Indeed, Amo goes so far as to say, at the very beginning of the Tractatus, “except for God, the first cause of all things, every being is the effect of an intention previously carried through to its end” (General Part, Chapter I, Member I, Observation, p. 1): so apparently the only genuine efficient causality is that of spirits acting by intentions. The basic argument is simply that every being other than God is efficiently caused by something, and that “every effect presupposes an operation as its principle [since a cause which is not operating will not produce any effect], and an operation is a necessary consequence of an intention”249 (General Part, Chapter I, Member I, Demonstration I, p. 2).250 Amo cannot seriously mean, after speaking of bodies acting by contact, penetration or communication, and of my body being acted on in sensation by an external body, to say that bodies do nothing, or are not causes in any way at all. But he thinks that they fall short of being genuine efficient causes. 249 Amo calls it intentionis consecutivum necessarium. Amo talks about “consecutive properties” or “consecutive effects” at Tractatus, General Part, Chapter III, Member III, §9, p. 37. Consecutivum here is undoubtedly somehow connected with the verb consequi, (see discussion in note 246 and the connected main text): perhaps a consecutivum of an intention is something which follows on the intention, perhaps something which the intention accomplishes. 250 The alternative Demonstration II pursues a somewhat more complicated strategy: every being is either an actual being or merely a being of reason [ens rationis]. If it is an actual being, then it is either a spiritual or material substance or a property of such. All such substances other than God have God as their (first) cause (and presumably their properties are dependent on their substances and thus on God), whereas every being of reason has the human mind (or, presumably, some other finite spirit) as its efficient cause. “Both efficient causes, God and the human mind, are intelligent substances, acting according to a plan [ex instituto] and operating intentionally; therefore every being is the effect of an intention put into action” (p. 2). This may not be arguing that every efficient cause, by the concept of efficient cause, would have to operate by an intention, just that everything other than God is ultimately efficiently caused by some spirit, and that a spirit can operate only by an intention.

140  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Perhaps Amo’s view is not that every operation must be guided by an intention, but that every type of operation which regularly produces an orderly or desirable effect must be acting for an end, and so must be guided by an intention. Some effects are in fact produced without any overall guiding intention: for instance, chance events such as a stone falling and landing in such a way as to provide a comfortable seat, or two stones with different origins falling and landing together in such a way as to provide a comfortable seat. To reconcile these cases with his claim that every being other than God is produced by a spirit acting according to an intention, Amo might say that the result of a chance event is merely an ens per accidens and so not in the strict sense a being: in the case of the seat formed by two stones, there are two per se beings, the two stones, and the seat is not a third per se being but is just the two stones under an accidental description (two-​stones-​conjoined-​ in-​a-​certain-​way); in the case of the seat formed by a single stone there is one per se being, the stone, but it already exists before the stone falls in such a way as to form a seat, and the seat is not a second per se being but is just the stone under an accidental description (stone-​oriented-​in-​a-​certain-​way). So perhaps things produced without a guiding overall intention are just per accidens beings, which are combinations or states of per se beings, and all per se beings other than God are produced in accordance with an intention, and therefore are produced by a spirit. So if my animal spirits and limbs were moving without any overall guiding intention, it is not that they would produce nothing, but they would not produce a single per se being, rather they would make accidental changes to already existing per se beings and accidentally combine them with each other: a new per se being comes about only when something comes about that has some purpose, and that happens only as the result of a spirit acting according to an intention. Of course, if my animal spirits and limbs were not moving, my intention would not succeed in producing any external effect. So, although bodies (such as my animal spirits and limbs) and their motions are not genuine efficient causes of any per se being, they are instrumental causes, which a human mind, or God, can make use of in producing some per se being. Perhaps we can say that bodies and their motions can also be occasional causes, not in the Malebranchean sense that they can occasion God to act, but in the sense that they can occasion a human mind to act—​so if I speak some words to you, or write some words on a piece of paper and give it to you, the motions of my limbs, of the air and the ink and so on, cannot even be instrumental causes acting on your mind, but they can still be an occasion on which your mind acts, when you cognize

Introduction  141 (cognizing the things I produce, or cognizing the other things of which those things are signs) and perhaps also when you take some practical action in response. Amo still shows some worry about what a human mind can add to the world, in acting according with its intentions, over and above what would have been produced without it by bodies, or more precisely by God acting in accordance with his own intentions using bodies as his instruments. As we have seen, Amo says that divine intentions always produce real beings, human intentions sometimes real beings and sometimes entia rationis, and that “the effect of a cognoscitive intention is an ens rationis, of an effective [intention] a real being” (Tractatus, General Part, Chapter I, Member III, §1 and §2, pp. 6–​7). But he also recognizes limits on what kinds of beings human intentions can produce. In the Distinct Idea he goes through the effects of each type of intention: “From the intellective act [there arise] intellectual things; from the act of willing and nilling, moral things; from the effective act, political and artificial things” (Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 3, Note). Likewise the Tractatus says that “the being [i.e., the effect] of a divine intention is either a substance or a property; one kind of substance is spirit, the other is matter or body, and one kind of property is spiritual, the other is material. The effects of a human intention are moral, political, and artificial things” (General Part, Chapter I, Member III, §2, p. 7); and Chapter I, Member I, Demonstration II says that not only all substances (spirit and matter) but also all properties (spiritual and material) owe their origin to God (p. 2). So human intentions do not produce substances, and there is some reservation about the sense in which they produce even properties of substances. An artificial thing might be an artifact, like a chair, or perhaps rather it is what the artisan adds to the already existing materials when he turns them into a chair. Apparently the human effective act produces a new real being in the materials, whereas a chance event that brought the materials together without purpose apparently would not; but the artificial being produced by the human intention is parasitic on the natural beings produced by divine intentions, and seems to have a lesser ontological status—​we might wonder what its reality consists in. Similarly moral and political things, which Amo is here taking directly or indirectly from Pufendorf,251 seem to be such things as rights, duties, titles, 251 Book I, Chapter  1 of Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, Londini Scanorum [= Lund]: Junghans, 1672, Book I, Chapter 1, is all about moral entities, a kind of attribute given to things for directing the acts of our will, which Pufendorf complains have not been properly demarcated and examined before, but which are necessary in order to determine the subject of the science

142  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations and legal persons: some of these, such as legal persons, might be thought of as fictions, and in any case they seem to have a more tenuous ontological status than natural things. Perhaps what I add to an object that I produce by an intention, over and above what would have been in the object if it had been produced by movements in my body without any overall guiding intention, is just a norm that governs how I and other agents should treat the object, rather than anything that a natural scientist would notice in giving a description of the object. In any case Amo seems to think that, given his account of how human intentions cause, they will be able to cause only a circumscribed range of effects, parasitic on the effects produced by bodies ultimately as instruments of divine intentions. Perhaps this is in turn because of his lack of an “interface” where the human mind can directly produce some new motion in bodies, and it may have the effect of bringing his position closer to Leibnizian preestablished harmony than he might want it to be. 6.3 The Distinct Idea: From the Classification of Mental Acts to How the Mind Acts on the Body Amo comes closest to giving an overall theory of how the mind contributes to the different kinds of human actions, and in particular how the mind acts on the body, in the Distinct Idea. The aim of this dissertation was to give “distinct idea of those things that pertain either to the mind or to our living and organic body,” and to assess what should be attributed to the mind and what to the body, in particular among the seven “faculties” that Jean Le Clerc attributes to the mind, namely intellect, will, sensation, liberty, imagination, memory, and habit. Amo tries to resolve the controversies by giving in Chapter 1 a classification of the three types of mental act (intellection, volition, the “effective act”) and analyzing each of them in terms of his theory of intentions, then applying this theory in Chapter 2 to each of Le Clerc’s alleged mental faculties. We have already seen the main lines of Amo’s theory of intentions and mental acts. We now note that each type of mental act depends on something bodily as well as on something mental. As Amo says in the Thesis at the beginning of Chapter 2, “All things that are effects of the exercise of an intention of the human mind are to be attributed to the mind to the extent that they have their nature from consciousness (Bewust-​ Werdung) and from the mind’s premeditated decision; but in so far as they of law. There is a reproduction of a later edition (Amsterdam: Hoogenhuysen, 1688), together with an English translation, Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium, 2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934.

Introduction  143 are effects of sensation, of the faculty of sensing and of the natural instinct considered simply in itself, they pertain to our living and organic body.” Indeed, on Amo’s analysis every intention involves something in our “living and organic body,” something that we use as a medium for knowing or an instrument for accomplishing some end. In further analyzing acts of intellection, he distinguished between “momentary” and “reflexive” acts of intellection, and, within the class of momentary acts, between those that precede all reflexive acts, and those that follow and depend upon reflexive acts.252 In non-​reflexive acts of intellection “the mind does not inquire into the origin, existence, and essence of the thing it is conscious of, and into the things which pertain to it, but simply applies ideas to the end it is conscious of ” (Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 1, §3). Here “the object about which is either the medium or the instrument, and something other is always intended by it. An end is that which, when it is acquired and present, the mind ceases from its former operation and comes to rest” (Chapter 1, Member 1, §3, Note 2). In the case of intellection, we use the medium, i.e., the sense-​organs and the motions in them, to intend some end that we want to know about: in the non-​ reflexive case we simply use the relation between the medium and the end to apply predicates to the end, whereas in reflection we critically examine the relation between the medium and the end that we intend by it, asking what we can now about the external thing from the fact that it is the cause of these sensations.253 In the process of reflection the mind acquires further ideas (“ideas that are acquired by judging reason”), which it can apply in further non-​reflexive acts. But in all these cases the act of intellection involves both something bodily and something mental: something bodily, becasuse they all begin from the “medium,” our sense-​organs and the motions in them, and use them to refer to and gain information about something beyond them; something mental because, as Amo says here, these acts “have their nature from consciousness (Bewust-​Werdung)” (Chapter 2, Thesis), i.e., because we use the medium to gain consciousness of the end we intend. It is only the mind, not the sensations themselves, that adds this aboutness, that can use the sensations to pass judgment on other things, and can pass judgment on the sensations themselves. 252 See note 246 above for references to Amo’s discussions of momentary and reflexive acts. 253 “An intellective act of the mind is reflexive in which the mind inquires really and, so far as it can, rightly and adequately, into the origin, existence, and essence of the thing of which it is conscious, and into the things that pertain to it, in order to understand the thing, so far as can be done, perfectly as it is in itself ” (Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 1, §4); compare the discussion, in Section 6.2, of the Tractatus on momentary and reflexive acts.

144  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Amo describes the case of volition as closely parallel to the case of intellection, and he combines the description of both acts in the Thesis of Chapter  2, putting “the natural instinct” in parallel with sensation, and “the mind’s premeditated decision” in parallel with consciousness. Natural instinct, like sensation, is something purely bodily, and it is necessary for volition as sensation is necessary for intellection—​we cannot simply will unless we have become conscious of some impulse in our body and of its end. (The third type of intentional act, “the mind’s effective act,” obviously also requires something bodily—​the mind will not accomplish anything in the external world except by applying some bodily instrument.) But what Amo stresses is the insufficiency of natural instinct for volition and thus for properly human action: if our actions were simply determined by the natural instinct, like those of irrational animals, they would not be genuinely intentional acts directed by reason toward some end. (This might be something like the thought-​experiment considered earlier: the motions of our animal spirits, if they were not guided by any overall intention, would still produce some effect or effects in the world, but not a coherent effect directed toward some end.) Will, or as Amo says more fully “the mind’s faculty of willing and nilling” (Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 2, Notice), because its negative exercise is important as well as its positive exercise, is always “an act of the mind by means of ideas for pursuing some end” (Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 2, §1), but it also always involves passing judgment on, and approving or disapproving of, some course of action suggested to us by the natural instinct. We do this by evaluating the suitability of the proposed action with regard to some end which we intend. But it seems to be important for Amo that we do not simply do some calculations on the spot, but rather apply “the premeditated decision of the mind” (Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 2, §1) or “decree of the mind” (Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 2, §1, Explanation 2, Note), which is perhaps something like a Kantian “maxim.” For Amo, more simply and directly than Kant, it seems that things reliably go wrong when the mind “indulges” the natural instinct and go right when it “commands” the natural instinct: presumably the commanding is not always contradicting the natural instinct, but sometimes approving it and perhaps sometimes in some way redirecting it toward an end.254 254 Amo cites especially Melanchthon for this picture of human action, but Melanchthon in turn is drawing on various strands of Greek philosophy (and marshalling them for some rather commonplace moralizing).

Introduction  145 Here, again, Amo is not thinking in terms of an “interactionist” model in which, say, an event in the body (an instinctive motion of the animal spirits stimulated by some external circumstance) would cause an event in the soul (an act of willing or nilling) which would in turn cause an event in the body (the motion of the animal spirits for the execution or non-​execution of the instinctive appetite). Rather, there is an already fixed mental state, a moral character or set of maxims, which, on the occasion of something happening to the body, produces an action through the body. Amo develops this point in Chapter 2 of the Distinct Idea, where he applies his fundamental analysis of action through an intention to analyzing each of Le Clerc’s seven alleged faculties of the mind, intellect and will and sensation and liberty and imagination and memory and habit. Of course for Amo sensation belongs entirely to the body. But he tries to show that each of the other acts depends on sensation or on natural instinct, and to that extent belongs to the body, but also depends on consciousness and the mind’s premeditated decision, and to that extent belongs to the mind. As in the case of volition, what the mind contributes comes from its persisting state (newly applied to a motion newly arising in the body), not from a newly caused mental event. There are no newly caused purely mental events, only things the mind newly does through the body and in response to the body, even when the action is an act of intellection with no practical end.255 We might think that Amo’s point, against Le Clerc’s simple interactionist picture of mind and body, is that in order to understand the mind’s action on the body we must take into account not only the mind’s momentary states and actions, but also its enduring dispositions: the mind acts in very different ways in different circumstances, but its dispositions are relatively slow to change, and are not changed directly by the action of external things but only by the mind’s repeated actions. But in fact Amo’s claim is much more radical than this. He grants, of course, that we have dispositions which are changed relatively slowly, and are built up by repeated actions: he talks about such dispositions in the paragraphs on “memory” and on “habit,” 255 So Amo says that even intellect “pertains to the body in so far as the ideas by which the mind operates are represented sensations” (Distinct Idea, Chapter 2, Member 2, §1). On representation, see Section 6.2. We attend to present objects, and represent absent (or past or future or non-​existent) objects. For many Scholastics including Zabarella, sensible species (and any higher species abstracted from them) serve to represent absent objects, so that we can have cognitive states directed toward those objects. For Amo representation is an active intentional operation of the mind, but the mind cannot accomplish it without something analogous to sensible species, something present in the body which the mind can interpret as representing something absent.

146  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations where “habit” means specifically a practical disposition and “memory” is a theoretical disposition. But Amo denies that these memories and habits are dispositions purely of the mind: they belong to the mind to the extent that they involve consciousness and premeditated decision, but the particular slowly changing dispositions are dispositions of the body (specifically of the brain, as he says in the paragraph on memory), formed in it not just by the repeated actions of external things on our body but specifically by the mind’s repeated actions performed in and through the body. The mind does have persisting purely mental dispositions which contribute to how it acts on the body, but on Amo’s theory these dispositions are entirely unchanging, and not are shaped even indirectly by external things. This is the conclusion that he is building up to throughout the Distinct Idea: the fundamental analysis of action through intentions in Chapter 1, and its applications to Le Clerc’s seven types of action in Chapter 2, support the final Corollary—​“Corollary” meaning not “incidental remark” but an added reward for the hard work of argument, something the audience can take away as what they have gained from the occasion256—​that “whatever is immutable in man pertains to the mind, but whatever is mutable with time pertains to the body.” The result is something very different from an “interactionist” theory of mind and body, since the body does not act on the mind and the mind acts on the body only through a constant disposition. As we have seen, Amo’s arguments against the possibility of the body’s acting on the mind also seem to impose limits on how the mind can act on the body. He accepts that the mind does not act on the body in the way Le Clerc might suggest, as if the mind and body formed a single dynamic system, and he tries to give an alternative explanation of how the mind contributes to the actions performed through the body. Certainly it does contribute, and the results are new each time because the mind is applying itself to different circumstances each time, but the mind contributes not by a new occurrent action at some causal interface with the body but by the constant light of consciousness and a constant “premeditated decision,” not as part of a system of efficient causal interaction but as guiding that system, from without, toward a rationally intended end. This relationship between mind and body might be compared to Malebranche’s 256 In classical Latin “corollarium” means something like “gratuity”:  an extra gift presented on some occasion, which is not strictly necessitated by the occasion but makes it more pleasant for the participants. By the early modern period corollaria have become a common feature of written works, particularly argumentative works like dissertations: see Horn, Die Disputationen und Promotionen an den deutschen Universitäten vornehmlich seit dem 16. Jahrhundert, p. 86.

Introduction  147 view of the relationship between God and the world, where God is entirely unchangeable and entirely unaffected by his creatures, and produces varying effects in the created world by applying his “general volitions,” eternally stable rules of action, to the varying circumstances that arise in the created world. For Amo the mind is a cause to the body, not in the way that one body is a cause to another body (by colliding with it and moving it according to the laws of motion which God has prescribed to the bodily world), but rather in something like the way that these laws themelves are causes to bodies, or in the way that God as the legislator of these laws is a cause to bodies. But whereas there is only one God, and the laws he prescribes are always good, determined by his wisdom and his generosity, different human minds impose different laws determining how they will respond to stimuli in their bodies. Each mind acts according to a system of intentions functioning together to attain the end that it has determined for itself, and the most fundamental intentions of each mind are unchanging (and guide the development of the changeable intentions, which change as the states of the body change), but they are different for different minds and express different characters, better and worse. While Amo is opposed to Le Clerc’s interactionism, he is also opposed to any determinist theory on which human actions and characters are ultimately determined by sensory stimuli arising from the body. Rather, the way we respond to these stimuli, both practically and cognitively, is determined by our character, and the most fundamental level of that character is an independent causal principle, like the Kantian noumenal self, free from temporal change and from any external causal influences.257

257 Amo would have known Stoic texts, including Epictetus’s Enchiridion (a text that seems to have been not just professionally but personally important to him), stressing that our actions depend on our assents to impressions, and that our assents depend not just on what impressions we are exposed to, but on our characters, which are dispositions to respond in certain ways to our impressions. But the Stoics do not think of these dispositions as eternally fixed, although the sage achieves a stable virtuous disposition. Corey Dyck, in his talk “Amo and the Neglected Path of Wolffianism” at the Amo conference in Halle in October 2018, discussed Pietist criticisms of Wolff for allowing our actions to be necessitated by our sensations, and sketched how Amo’s account of the mind’s freedom and spontaneity could (and were perhaps intended to) yield a response to these Pietist criticisms within a broadly Wolffian framework.

II Note on the Text and Translation of Amo’s Dissertations We provide both a transcription of the Latin texts of the Impassivity and Distinct Idea, from their first and only printings in respectively April and May 1734, and a facing-​page English translation. We try to keep the Latin and English in pace with each other: since the English translation is wordier and has more footnotes, we print some of the footnotes to the English on the Latin side. In the Latin we note the pagination of the original 1734 printing in brackets, at the beginning of each page of the original. The Impassivity is 24 pages and the Distinct Idea is 16 pages: dissertations were printed for technical reasons in multiples of 8 pages, and the authors try not to waste paper by leaving pages blank. Our transcriptions look different, in ways that we go on to describe, from the original printings, and some readers may want to find and compare the original printings. They can be found in good photoreproductions in Burchard Brentjes, ed., Antonius Guilielmus Amo Afer aus Axim in Ghana, Student, Doktor der Philosophie, Magister Legens an den Universitäten Halle, Wittenberg, Jena, 1727–​1747: Dokumente, Autographe, Belege, Martin-​Luther-​Universität Halle-​Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), 1968, itself unfortunately now a rather rare book like much of the literary production of the former DDR. Scans of the dissertations can also be found on line: in particular, the Impassivity can be found on the website of the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, and the Distinct Idea on the website of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. For the reasons we have given, our pagination is different from the original pagination, which we note in brackets. We leave out merely decorative items (curlicues) from the original printings, but we have kept the double circle with the letters L. S. inside it, which symbolically preserves the actual seal of the University of Wittenberg on the rector’s letter attesting to Amo’s merits and progress. We have tried to preserve the centerings and indentations of lines, and significant page breaks, in the original printings. We have added line spacing between paragraphs (i.e., between the smaller units that would Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body. Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197501627.001.0001

Note on the Text and Translation  149 be called paragraphs in modern English, and not just between the larger units, numbered and marked with §, that Amo himself would call paragraphs). We have left out the “catchwords,” that is, the first word of page n+1 printed at the bottom of page n. We have corrected what seem to be typographical errors in the original printings, putting what we think is the correct version in the main text and noting the mistake in a footnote. (At least one of these issues is important and affects the interpretation of the text, and some readers may disagree with our judgment; we have provided you with the information, and you can make up your mind for yourself.) On the other hand, we have silently imposed some standard Latin conventions on what should be printed as one word and what as two words. We have corrected mistakes in the printed Greek (usually false or missing accents, some missing breathings, a few other mistakes): we put the correct version in the main text, and the original printed version in the footnotes. It is possible that the Greek mistakes are due to Amo, but likely that they are due to the printer. Our strong impression is that Amo was never given the opportunity to correct the proofs, and certainly the printers did some arbitrary things. We have preserved the original punctuation in the transcription, but not the translation, even though we often have little idea what the punctuation is supposed to be marking, and sometimes we think it was just a mistake. We have felt free to override the original punctuation in our translation, but if a reader can get useful clues to Amo’s meaning from the original punctuation, more power to them. We have preserved capitalization (including whole words in capitals) in the transcription but not always in the translation. We have preserved italics in the transcription, but not always in the translation; but we have tried to keep them in the translation when they might add something to the meaning (not, for instance, when they would be replaced on a more modern convention by quotation marks). Sometimes Amo italicizes a term when he is going to go back and pick it up, for example by giving a definition of a term that he has initially used without definition. But, as with punctuation, it is not always obvious why a word is capitalized or in all-​capitals or italics. The conventions are definitely not the modern conventions, and in some cases it was probably the printer’s judgment rather than Amo’s. In the translation we have tried to preserve the centerings and indentations which introduce new paragraphs in the Latin text, but we have not added spacing between paragraphs except where there is a centered heading: this approximates the usage of the original printing. In the translation, but not the transcription, we have sometimes intervened in numbered

150  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations lists: sometimes the text has items numbered (2) . . . (3) . . . (4), but no (1), and we have gone back and inserted a (1), in the translation, at what seemed the appropriate place before the (2). For the first part of the Impassivity, “u” is always used for a lowercase Latin letter u/​v and “V” always for an uppercase u/​v ; then a few lowercase “v”s are used in abbreviations like “vid.” Then on p. 11 the policy collapses and some “U”s and “v”s are allowed; and the distinction between u and v does not always correspond to the distinction between the vowel and the consonant. This is surely something that the printer did arbitrarily. We have preserved it in our transcription, but it should be a warning against simply deferring to the authority of the original printings. When Amo cites something in German, it is printed in the original in Fraktur; we have standardized this in our transcription to standard Roman type. The original printings mark Chapters, Members, Sections, and occasionally Notes and the like with Roman numerals, with Arabic numerals only for the paragraphs (§—​these are in Roman numerals in the Impassivity but Arabic in the Distinct Idea and Tractatus) and the numbered lists often within a sentence. We have kept this in the transcription, but have imposed Arabic numerals for everything in the translation, except for the Roman numerals marking the theses in the Impassivity, and the apparently free-​floating Roman numerals (not serving as titles for divisions of the text) which, as we argued in the Introduction, seem to substitute for a formal list of theses in the Distinct Idea. The original printings have no footnotes; all footnotes are ours. We have spent a great deal of energy chasing down Amo’s references and supplying them in the footnotes. Earlier translators had worked at supplying the references, but their results are not satisfactory, and now that many early modern books have been scanned, and many libraries have made scans of their older holdings available on the Internet, the task has become easier. Amo does give citations to the works he uses, generally by giving the author’s surname (and sometimes a given name or initials) and an abbreviated book title, and a chapter or other book division and/​or a page number. But he does not give us anything else (such as the date or place or publisher) to help identify which edition he is using. These works were often published in many editions, as was common in early modern Europe; sometimes these editions were more or less pirated, sometimes without telling the reader that there had been earlier editions; sometimes they are exact reproductions of earlier

Note on the Text and Translation  151 editions, but often there is new pagination, and often there are changes in the text, especially an author adding new material to later editions within his lifetime, or someone adding new material from the author’s notes to a posthumous edition. For these reasons, a reference to a particular passage is often difficult or impossible to trace if you don’t have the right edition: sometimes the passage is simply not there at all, and sometimes it is not where the reference says it is. We may not always have found the edition that Amo was using, and in some cases we are fairly sure that we have not, because the page numbers are wrong, but we have generally managed to find an edition that says what Amo says it says (and usually on the right pages). The scans available online, especially at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and sometimes other German state and university libraries, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (the gallica website), the Internet Archive, and Google Books have been very helpful—​it is possible that our readers, by searching further in these sources, will be able to improve our references. It is important to find the original passages and to read them in context, rather than taking Amo’s word for what the author meant. Amo is often loose in his citations, probably a result of his taking incomplete notes when he read the books in a library, and then referring to his notes rather than rechecking the book—​strikingly, while he repeatedly cites an edition of Descartes’s Letters, he cites not only letters by Descartes, but also a letter to Descartes, and a letter by Descartes’s editor after Descartes’s death, without indicating that they are not all by Descartes. Often he quotes only part of a sentence, and you need the rest of the sentence to see what point Amo is making by citing it. And Amo’s interpretations are often tendentious. For instance, in the “State of the Controversy” in the Impassivity, where Amo tries to show that Descartes and Sennert each contradict themselves about whether the soul or the body senses, the contradictions follow only if we supply premises that Amo himself accepts but that Descartes and Sennert do not. This is all normal practice within the eighteenth-​century academic game of dissertations and disputations, but we must check Amo’s references to be able to evaluate critically his relations to the earlier authors who he positions himself against. By giving an English translation, filling in Amo’s references, and adding further footnotes, we try to make clear how we are interpreting Amo’s meaning and argument. By giving the Latin transcription as well, we make it possible for the reader to check our interpretation. We have exercised our best judgment, and have learned from each other and from the other participants in the meetings in Berlin, Montreal, and Halle, and from the

152  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations written comments of Paolo Rubini and François Duchesneau, but we are well aware that our results are provisional. Translating Amo is not like doing a new translation of Descartes’s Meditations, with centuries of editions and translations and scholarly studies to draw on. We understand Amo much better than we did five years ago, but we are sure that, fairly soon, we and others will understand more about Amo than we do at present, and will be able to correct our translations and interpretations. We encourage all readers who have Latin to make their own judgments about Amo’s meaning, making critical use of our proposals and of the information we supply. We look forward to receiving further constructive criticisms and suggestions, especially since we hope to produce a paperback edition of the translation (probably without the Latin), and we hope to be able to make corrections there.

III Inaugural Dissertation on the Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734) (Latin and English)  

Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body. Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197501627.001.0001

154  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Q. D. B. V. Dissertatio inavgvralis philosophica de Hvmanae mentis ΑΠΑΘΕΙΑ sev Sensionis ac facvltatis sentiendi in mente hvmana absentia et earvm in corpore nostro orga-​ nico ac vivo praesentia qvam praeside D. Mart. Gotthelf Loeschero Med. et phys. prof. pvbl. nec non sereniss. dvcis saxo-​vinariensis phys. provincial. pvblice defendit avctor Antonivs Gvilielmvs Amo Gvinea—​Afer Phil. et AA. LL. Magister, et I. V. C. In Avditorio Maiori MDCCXXXIV. Mense April.

_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ VVittebergae Ex officina schlomachiana

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  155 May God turn it to good! Inaugural Philosophical Dissertation On the Impassivity1 of the Human Mind Or the Absence of Sensation and of the Faculty of Sensing in the Human Mind And their Presence in our Organic and Living Body With Dr. Martin Gotthelf Löscher, Public Professor of Medicine and Physics and Provincial Physician of the most Serene Duke of Saxe-​Weimar, presiding, is publicly defended by the Author,2 Anton Wilhelm Amo from Guinea in Africa,3 Master of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts, and Student of both Laws4 In the Great Auditorium April, 1734

_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_ Wittenberg: Schlomach

156  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations De Hvmanae mentis ἀπαθεία. Declarationvm idearvm tam a parte svbiecti qvam praedicati theseos, conspectvs. A parte svbjecti.

I. QVid Spiritus in genere C. I. m. I. §. 1. II. Quid mens humana in Specie ibid. §. 3. A parte praedicati.

I. Quid oppositum praedicati, nempe (α) quid sensio (β) quid facultas sentiendi? dl. m. II. II. Quid ipsum praedicatum uel ἀπάθεια?a ibid. m. III. III. Quid denique ipsa propositio, i.e. ipsa humanae mentis ἀπάθεια?b

His fundamenti loco explicatis sequuntur, status quaestionis et Theses.

I. Thesis negatiua:  mens humana non sentit res materiales, cum debitis Probationibus. II. Thesis altera negatiua: nec sentiendi facultas menti competit. III. Thesis tertia affirmatiua, sed corpori nostro organico et uiuo, cum suis probationibus.

a The original printing: ἀπαθεία. The original printing always either puts the accent of ἀπάθεια on the penult, not only in the genitive and dative where it is correct, but also in the nominative and accusative where it should be on the antepenult, or else leaves out the accent (and sometimes also the breathing) altogether. In the title of the dissertation ἀπαθεία is an artificial Latin ablative of a Greek word, and the final α is long, so the accent on the penult is correct. b The original printing: ἀπαθεία.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  157 ON THE IMPASSIVITY OF THE HUMAN MIND CONSPECTUS OF THE CLARIFICATIONS OF THE IDEAS, ON THE PART BOTH OF THE SUBJECT AND OF THE PREDICATE OF THE THESIS

On the part of the Subject: I. What is spirit in general? Chapter 1, Member 1, §1 II. What is the human mind in particular? Chapter 1, Member 1, §3 On the part of the Predicate: I. What is the opposite of the predicate, namely (a)  what is sensation, (b) what is the faculty of sensing? Chapter 1, Member 2 II. What is the predicate itself, or impassivity? Chapter 1, Member 3 III. Finally, what is the proposition itself, i.e., the impassivity of the human mind? With these things explained as a foundation, there follow the state of the question and theses:5 I. Negative thesis: the human mind does not sense material things, with the requisite proofs II. Second negative thesis: nor does the faculty of sensing belong to the mind III. Third, affirmative thesis: but rather to our organic and living body, with its proofs 1 Something is “impassive” if it cannot be acted on. For “impassivity” Amo consistently uses the Greek word ἀπάθεια; the word does not have a very good Latin equivalent. 2 “Publice defendit auctor”: “defendit” could be either present tense (“the author publicly defends”) or perfect tense (“the author has publicly defended”), but it is probably perfect, so that the dissertation would have been printed after the disputation. If it had been printed before the disputation, it might have used a future tense “defendet.” If the printed dissertation functioned—​as they often did—​ as an invitation to a disputation, it is very strange that the day of the month is not given. The title page of the Distinct Idea does give the day, but not the time. 3 The identification by place of birth is standard (Johannes Theodosius Meiner is identified on the title page of the Distinct Idea as “from Rochlitz in Meissen”), and in fact is still the required form in German dissertations. It does not imply any special obsession with Amo’s African origin. 4 “I. U. C.” = “Iuris Utriusque Cultor.” This title evidently implies that Amo had not received a law degree from Halle, as he is often said to have done; see the Introduction. 5 The “State of the Question” (or “State of the Controversy”) and theses are standardly marked parts of a dissertation. Amo gives the state of the question, and states and argues for his theses, in Chapter 2, which is not divided into Members like Chapter 1.

158  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations

[4]‌CAP. I. Continens declarationes idearvm in thesi contentarvm. Praemonitum ad rubrum hujus disputationis. Per humanae mentis ἀπάθειανc intelligimus:  absentiam sensionis et facultatis sentiendi in mente humana. Per ea quae dicuntur. cap. II. m. I. §. I. etc.

Membrvm I. Continens declarationes idearum subiecti, siue de mente humana in genere et in specie. Nota ad rubrum huius membri. Quia mens humana subiectum quaestionis seu theseos est, operis ratio postulat, ut declaremus quidnam per eandem intelligamus, eum in finem ut positis ideis claris et distinctis felicius res Procedat. §. I. Qvid spiritvs in genere? Mens humana in genere est Spirituum, ergo declaratio ne quadam opus est, quidnam per uocabulum seu denominationem Spiritus intelligamus; est autem nobis Spiritus. Quaeuis substantia mere actuosa, immaterialis, per se semper intelligens, suaque sponte ex intentione operans, propter destinatum et sibi conscium finem. Nota I. Intelligere et sibi alicuius rei conscium fieri, sunt Synonyma.

c The original printing: ἀπαθείαν. 6 That is, clarification of the idea of spirit in general and of the more specific idea of the human mind.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  159

CHAPTER 1: CONTAINING CLARIFICATIONS OF THE IDEAS CONTAINED IN THE THESIS Notice concerning the title of this disputation. By “impassivity of the human mind” we understand: the absence from the human mind of sensation and of the faculty of sensing. This is addressed in Chapter 2, Member 1, §1, etc.

MEMBER 1 Containing clarifications of the ideas of the subject, or of the human mind in general and particular6 Note concerning the title of this member. Because the human mind is the subject of the question or thesis, the nature of the task requires that we clarify what we understand by “human mind,” to the end that, having laid down clear and distinct ideas, the enterprise may proceed more successfully. §1 What is Spirit in General? The human mind belongs to the genus of spirits. Thus we need a clarification of what we understand by the term or denomination “spirit.”7 So: for us, a spirit is any purely active, immaterial substance which is always in itself understanding and operating spontaneously and intentionally on account of a determinate8 end of which it is conscious. Note 1. To understand and to become conscious of some thing are synonyms.

7 In his treatment of spirit in the 1738 Tractatus de arte sobrie et accurate philosophandi, Amo refers the reader to this section of the Impassivity. See Tractatus, Special Part, Section II, Chapter II, Question VI, Note I, p. 101. 8 Amo’s word here is “destinatum,” but he substitutes “determinatum” when he cites this formula in §4. “A determinate end” probably means not just “one single end” but “an end which it has determined for itself,” or “an end to which it has directed itself.”

160  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Nota II. Per intentionem intelligimus; illam spiritus operationem, qua sibi aliquid notum facit, quo exercito finis consequatur.

Nota III. Finis est, quo adepto et praesente, spiritus a pristina sua operatione cessans adquiescit. [5]‌Expositiones praecedentis mox descriptionis spiritvs. Expositio I. Dico spiritum esse substantiam mere actuosam, quod idem acsi dicas: spiritus nullam in se admittit passionem. Probationesd huius expositionis.  Si spiritus sentire, uel in se passionem admittere, dicatur hoc fieri deberet aut per communicationem, aut penetrationem, aut denique per contactum. Nota. I. Per communicationem intelligo:  Quando Partes, proprietates et effectus unius entis, mediante actu quodam, praesentes fiunt in alio ente analogo et apto.

Exemplum. Sic ignis suum calorem ferro candenti, quin se ipsum communicare uidemus.e d The original printing has probationis, which should be corrected either to probationes or to probatio. Probationis for probationes is the easier printer’s error, and we have assumed that Amo meant probationes. In a sense there is only one proof, but it could be regarded as several proofs, namely the proof that spirit is not affected by contact, the proof that it is not affected by penetration, and the proof that it is not affected by communication. e The original printing, apparently, has “Sic ignis suum calorem ferre candenti, quin? se ipsum communicare uidemus.” See our note to the translation. 9 In the discussion of intention in the Tractatus, Amo refers back to this Note. See Tractatus, General Part, Chapter I, §7, Note, p. 4. 10 We take “sibi aliquid notum facit” to be equivalent to “sibi aliquid conscium facit” and to “sibi alicuius conscium fieri” (as in Note 1), and to mean “become conscious of something” or “consciously attend to something” (Amo gives the German equivalent “Bewust-​Werdung” in the Distinct Idea). “Conscius” in Latin and “bewust” (in current spelling “bewusst”) in German can be said either of the mind that is conscious of something or of the thing of which the mind is conscious: see Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (now accessible electronically at woerterbuchnetz.de), under the word “bewust.” (The Grimms initially define “bewust” as “notus,” but also give “conscius,” and

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  161 Note 2.9 By intention we understand that operation of the spirit by which it becomes conscious of something such that if it is carried out an end would follow.10 Note 3. An end is that which, when it is gained and present, the spirit, ceasing from its former operation, comes to rest.11 EXPLANATIONS OF THE IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING DESCRIPTION OF SPIRIT Explanation 1. I say that a spirit is a purely active substance, which is the same as to say that a spirit does not admit any passion in itself. Proofs of this explanation  If a spirit were said to sense, or to admit passion within itself, this would have to occur either by communication, or by penetration, or, finally, by contact. Note 1. By “communication” I  understand when the parts, properties, and effects of one entity become present, by means of some act, in another entity which is analogous and suited [to receive those parts, properties and effects]. Example. In this way fire [communicates] its heat to a glowing iron, without our seeing it communicate itself.12 say “sich bewust sein einer sache” = “sibi conscium esse alicujus,” and as a less common usage “bewust machen” = “bekannt machen.”) In translating here, we transfer the adjective from the object to the mind. It is not obvious what Amo means by the condition “if [the thing of which we become conscious] is carried out”: I can become conscious of a table, but what would it mean for a table to be “carried out” or “exercised”? A paradigm case would be practical deliberation: in considering the end X, I become aware of Y, where Y is an action that it would be in my power to perform and where if I did Y, X would also result. But Amo wants there to be an analogous structure in purely cognitive intentions: in considering the end X, which is an object I want to know, I become aware of Y, where Y is an effect of X on my sense-​ organs or on some object I can observe more directly, and where if I attend to Y and interpret it as a sign for X, knowledge of X will also follow. See the Introduction for discussion of Amo’s theory of intentions. 11 Amo is deliberately avoiding defining “end” as “for the sake of which.” His definition of “intention” and of “end” are meant to apply both to practical and to purely cognitive cases. 12 Both text and interpretation are problematic. We read as “ferro” (dative of “ferrum,” modified by “candenti”) a word which appears in the printed text to be “ferre” (infinitive of “fero”). Suárez discusses whether a glowing iron (“ferrum candens,” as here) has fire or only heat present in it, how it can cause fire if it does not itself contain fire, and so on (Metaphysical Disputations 18.2.30 and 18.9.31);

162  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Nota. II. Per penetrationem intelligo: Transitum unius entis per partes entis alterius mediante quodam actu. Nota. III. Quid contactus sit, ipsa sensio docet immediata; sed ne uerba sine ideis dicta uideantur; per contactum intelligimus: Quando duae superficies in puncto aliquo physico seu sensibili se mutuo tangunt. Adplicationes. Dico I. Omnem spiritum esse extra omnem passionem. Ratio I. Nullae partes, proprietates et effectus alterius entis, mediante actu quodam in spiritu fieri possunt praesentes; alias spiritus aliud contineret in sua essentia et substantia, quam continere debet. Item, continere, et contineri sunt conceptus materiales, nec cum ueritate de spiritu praedicari possunt. Non igitur spiritus sentit per communicationem i.e. eo modo quo partes, proprietates, et effectus entis materiales, in eodem mediante aliquo actu praesentes fieri debent. Ratio II. Nullus spiritus per se et per accidens, recipit Partes, [6]‌ proprietates et effectus materiales et sensibiles, contrarie enim opponitur enti sensibili; sed inter contrarie opposita, nulla datur communicatio. Nota ad hanc rationem. contrarie oppositae sunt res, quae ita comparatae sunt ut unius absentia alterius praesentiam, alterius praesentia prioris absentiam importet. v.c. Si aliquid est immateriale sequitur quod materiale esse nequeat:  sunt enim contrarie opposita, nam praedicatum immaterialitatis excludit praedicatum materialitatis, quia praesentia immaterialitatis est absentia materialitatis. item ubi adest spiritualitas ibi abest materialitas et uice uersa.

this seems to have been a standard example. There are also syntactical problems:  “ignis,” which is nominative (or conceivably genitive), should grammatically be accusative as the subject of an infinitive (either “communicare” or “ferre”) and object of “videmus.” Also what looks like a question mark after “quin” breaks the Example into two sentences, the first of which does not have a main verb. “Quin . . . videmus” could be either affirmative “indeed, we see,” or negative “without our seeing,” although if it is negative it should normally govern a subjunctive “videamus.” We are understanding an implicit form of “communicare” in the first clause as well, construing “sic ignis suum calorem ferro candenti [communicat], quin se ipsum communicare uidemus,” and assuming that “videmus” instead of “videamus” is a mistake or a non-​classical usage due either to Amo or to the printer. Amo’s thought may be that the fire clearly communicates its properties and effect (namely heat) to the iron, even though it may not communicate its parts. But it is possible that he means “indeed, we see it communicate itself.”

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  163 Note 2. By “penetration” I understand the passage of one entity, by means of some act, between the parts of another entity. Note 3. What contact is, immediate sensation itself teaches; but lest words appear to be spoken without ideas, by “contact” we understand when two surfaces mutually touch one another in some physical or sensible point. Applications13 I say, 1, Every spirit is beyond every passion. Reason 1. No parts, properties, or effects of another entity can become present in a spirit by means of some act. Otherwise the spirit would contain in its essence and substance something other than what it was supposed to contain. Again, to contain and to be contained are material concepts, nor can they be truly predicated of spirit. Therefore a spirit does not sense through communication, i.e., in such a way that the material parts, properties and effects of an entity are supposed to become present in it by means of some act.14 Reason 2. No spirit per se and per accidens15 receives material and sensible parts, properties, and effects, for it is the contrary opposite of sensible being, but between contrary opposites there is no communication. Note concerning this reason. Contrary opposites are things so related that the absence of one entails the presence of the other and the presence of the other entails the absence of the first, e.g., if something is immaterial it follows that it cannot be material, for they are contrary opposites, since the predicate of immateriality excludes the predicate of materiality, because the presence of immateriality is the absence of materiality. Again, wherever spirituality is present, materiality is absent, and vice versa. 13 The applications are the propositions following each occurrence of “I say,” 1, 2, and 3 (with the Reasons and Note under “I say,” 1), which are applications of Notes 1, 2, and 3 under Explanation 1, and which collectively add up to a proof that a spirit cannot be acted on in any of the three possible ways, i.e., by contact, penetration, or communication. So the “Proofs of this Explanation” announced after Explanation 1 are not completed until we have gone through the “Applications.” Both the “Proofs” and the “Applications” fall under Explanation 1, although the centered headings can make it look as if Explanations 2, 3, and 4 will also be among the “Applications.” 14 Here and throughout these Applications, Amo is developing standard early modern arguments against “physical influx” models of the causality of body (or anything else) on spirit. See Eileen O’Neill, “Influxus Physicus,” in Causation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, 27–​56; and see the Introduction. 15 The conjunction is peculiar; perhaps the intended sense is “either per se or even per accidens.”

164  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Dixi quod spiritus non sentiat seu patiatur per communicationem; Nunc. Dico II. Nullus spiritus sentit seu patitur per modum penetrationis, quia penetratio est:  Transitus entis per partes entis alterius; sed nullus spiritus partibus Constitutiuis gaudet; Ergo; extra omnem passionem est, quatenus passio fit per modum penetrationis, siue per transitum per partes entis alterius. Dico III. Nec sentit seu patitur per contactum; Nam quidquid tangit et tangitur corpus est. uid. Dn. Des Cartes in Epistolis Part. III. Epist. 14. §. 12. uerbis: primo tibi dicam etc. Item contactus est quando duae superficies in puncto aliquo physico se mutuo tangunt, nec punctum sensibile, neque superficies de spiritu praedicari possunt, ergo neque passio, quatenus fieri debet per contactum. Expositio II. Spiritus omnis per se semper intelligit. i.e. conscius est sibi sui, suarumque operationum, necnon aliarum rerum. Nota. Quamuis ignorem illum modum, quo Deus et alii extra [7]‌materiam spiritus, se, suas operationes aliasque res intelligunt, probabile tamen mihi non uidetur eos intelligere per ideas; eo modo quo idea est: operatio mentis nostrae momentanea, qua res antea sensibus et organis sensoriis perceptas, sibi repraesentat seu praesentes sistit. Carent enim Deus aliique spiritus extra materiam positi, sensionibus organisque sensoriis Corporeque uiuo et organico. Item in Deo non datur repraesentatio, nam alias daretur in Deo repraesentatio futuri, praeteriti et rei absentis; Atqui in Deo non datur scientia

16 Compare passages of Leibniz, notably Discourse on Metaphysics §26 (in C. J. Gerhardt, ed., Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–​1890, vol. 4, p. 451; in Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, eds., G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989, p. 58) and Monadology §7 (in Gerhardt v. 6, pp. 607–​608, in Ariew and Garber p. 213), both cited and discussed in the Introduction, denying that the human soul, or any other “monad” or simple substance, has “windows” through which something could enter. Leibniz is directing this objection specifically against Scholastic theories on which sense-​perception depends on the soul receiving into itself a “sensible species,” an image produced by the sensible object and representing that object. See the Introduction for discussion of Scholastic theories of sensible species and early modern criticisms of them, to the extent that they form part of the background to Amo’s criticism of earlier theories of sensation. 17 Amo cites Descartes’s letters from the Amsterdam edition, Renati Descartes Epistolae, Partim ab Auctore Latino sermone conscriptae, partim ex Gallico translatae, Pars Prima and Pars Secunda, Amsterdam: Daniel Elzevir, 1668 (at least sometimes bound together), and Renati Descartes Epistolae, Partim Latino sermone conscriptae, partim e Gallico in Latinum versae, Pars Tertia, Amsterdam: Blaeu

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  165 I have said that a spirit does not sense or undergo passion through communication. Now I say, 2: No spirit senses or undergoes passion by means of penetration, since penetration is the passage of an entity between the parts of another entity, but no spirit has constitutive parts. Thus, it is beyond all passion to the extent that passion occurs by means of penetration, or by passage between the parts of another entity.16 I say, 3:  Neither does it sense or undergo passion through contact. For whatever touches and is touched is a body (see Descartes in his Letters, Part III, Letter 114, §12, with the words, “First, I shall say to you,” etc.).17 Again, contact occurs when two surfaces mutually touch one another in a physical point; neither a sensible point nor a surface can be predicated of spirit, thus neither can passion to the extent that it is supposed to arise through contact. Explanation 2. Every spirit always understands through itself, i.e., it is conscious of itself, of its operations, and of other things. Note. Although I do not know how God and other spirits beyond matter understand themselves, their operations, and other things, nevertheless it does not seem likely to me that they understand by means of ideas, in the sense in which an “idea” is a momentary operation of our mind, by which it represents, [i.e.] sets up as present, things that were previously perceived by the senses and the sensory organs. For God and other spirits that are posited beyond matter lack sensations, sensory organs, and a living and organic body. Again, in God there is no representation: for otherwise there would

[“Typographia Blaviana”], 1683. This three-​volume Latin edition is a translation (where necessary) of the edition of Claude Clerselier, also in three volumes, Paris: Angot, 1657–​1667; it usually preserves Clerselier’s numbering of the letters. The present citation is from Part III, p. 420. This letter (III, 114 in the Amsterdam edition, 124 in Clerselier) is at Adam and Tannery V, 133–​39. Adam and Tannery think that the letter, whose addressee is unnamed in Clerselier, is to the Marquess of Newcastle, William Cavendish (the husband of the philosopher Margaret Cavendish) and give a date of March or April 1648. But the paragraph that Amo cites (AT V, 135–​36), on the transfer of a quantity of motion from one body to another, does not seem to say that whatever touches or is touched is a body. However, this was a commonplace, asserted by both Stoics and Epicureans, familiar to Latin writers from Lucretius I, 304, “tangere enim et tangi, nisi corpus, nulla potest res,” but made more respectable by being cited and endorsed by Seneca (so Seneca, Letter 106, explicitly citing Lucretius; similar thoughts in Letter 117). This Lucretian tag is cited by Henry More in a letter to Descartes, in the Amsterdam edition (as in Clerselier) Part I, Letter 66, in the Amsterdam edition pp. 176–​83, the Lucretius passage (explicitly cited as Lucretius) at p. 178.

166  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations praeteriti et futuri, necnon absentis; sed in cognitione eius omnia praesentia sunt, ergo nulla in eo datur repraesentatio; quia repraesentatio supponit absentiam rei repraesentandae. Sequitur igitur exinde Deum aliosque spiritus se, suas operationes et alias res intelligere sine omni idealitate siue ideis et sensionibus repetitis, sed mens nostra per ideas et intelligit et operatur, ob arctissimum cum corpore uinculum et commercium uid. Nobil. Dn. de Berger in Physiolog. Lib. I. c. I. pag. 1. et 5. Dn. Des Cartes siue Cartesius in Epistolis. port. III. Epist. 115. Part. I. Epist. 29. et 36.

Expositio III. Omnis spiritus operatur sua sponte i.e. intrinsece, suas operationes determinat ad finem consequendum, nec aliunde absolute cogitur ut operetur. Ratio. Si spiritus aliunde cogatur hoc fieret aut cogente spiritu alio, aut materia. Si spiritu alio, salua manet in utroque spontaneitas seu Libera agendi et reagendi facultas. Si a materia spiritus cogatur, hoc fieri nequit, quia spiritus semper est actuosus, sed materia semper patiens quid, et omnem recipiens actionem in se agentis.

Expositio IV. Spiritus operatur ex intentione i.e. ex praecognitione rei quae fieri debet finisque quem sua operatione consequi intendit.

[8]‌ Ratio. In hoc enim consistit natura operationis, entis rationaliter et ex intelligentia operantis.

18 Johann Gottfried von Berger, Physiologia medica sive de natura humana, Wittenberg:  Meyer & Zimmermann, 1702. See note 17 on Amo’s citations of Descartes’s letters. But one letter he cites here, Part III, Letter 115 in the Amsterdam edition (Letter 125 in Clerselier, the last letter in both editions), is not by Descartes, but is a letter from Clerselier to Louis de la Forge, written ten years after Descartes’s death. Part I, Letter 29 (in both editions), is a letter from Descartes to Elisabeth of Bohemia, pp. 59–​61 in the Amsterdam edition, on soul-​body union and interaction, AT III, 663–​68, dated May 21, 1643. Part I, Letter 36 (in both editions), pp. 80–​84 in the Amsterdam edition, is a letter from Descartes to Chanut, AT V, 50–​58, 6 June 1647. 19 Or “toward an end which is to follow.” See Explanation 4. We delete the comma after intrinsece, one of many false punctuation marks in the printed text.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  167 be in God representation of the future, of the past, and of an absent thing; but in God there is no knowledge of the past and the future and the absent. Rather, in his cognition all things are present, and thus in him there is no representation, since representation supposes the absence of the thing to be represented. Therefore it follows from this that God and other spirits understand themselves, their operations, and other things without any ideality or ideas and recollected sensations, whereas our mind both understands and operates through ideas on account of its very tight bond and commerce with the body (von Berger in his Physiologia, Book I, Chapter 1, pp. 1 and 5; Descartes in his Letters, Part III, Letter 115, and Part I, Letters 29 and 36).18 Explanation 3. Every spirit operates spontaneously, i.e., intrinsically deter­mines its operations toward achieving an end,19 and is not compelled by anything else at all to operate.20 Reason. If a spirit were compelled by anything else, this would come about either by another spirit compelling it, or by matter [compelling it]. If by another spirit, then the spontaneity or free faculty of acting and reacting would remain intact in both of them. If the spirit is compelled by matter, this could not come about, since spirit is always active, but matter is always something passive, and receiving any action of an agent in itself. Explanation 4. A spirit operates from an intention, i.e., from a precognition of a thing that is supposed to come about, and of an end that it intends to attain through its operation.21 Reason. For in this consists the nature of the operation of an entity operating rationally and from understanding. 20 In “nec aliunde absolute cogitur,” “absolute” could be taken with “cogitur”—​it is not absolutely compelled by anything else to operate—​but since the following Reason draws no distinction between absolute compulsion and something gentler, we have taken the word instead with “aliunde,” “by anything else at all.” 21. Five times in the present §1 of Chapter 1, Member 1 (here, and twice in I say, 1, Reason 1, once in I say, 3, and once in Corollary 1), we translate Latin debere [= German “sollen”] by “is supposed to.” On intentions, see Note 2 of the present §1. An intention involves a spirit’s being conscious of two things, an end and something which is related to that end and is somehow in the spirit’s power: a possible action which, if we perform it, can lead to our acquiring the end, or an object which, if we interpret it as a sign of the end, can lead to our knowing the end. The first phrase, “a precognition of a thing that is supposed to come about” (or “is supposed to be done”), apparently refers not to the end

168  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Consectarium I. Omnis causa efficiens debet intelligere se ipsum, suas operationes, et rem quae fieri debet. Consectarium II. Omne ens actuosum in quo datur conscientia sui, suarum operationum et aliarum rerum, illud spiritus est. Expositio V. Spiritus est immaterialis i.  e. nihil materiale habet in sua essentia et proprietatibus. Ratio. Contrarie oppositorum unum alterum continere et habere nequit; quia contrarie opposita ab inuicem excludunt, genus, speciem et eandem denominationem. §. II. Hactenus de Spiritu ea saltem egimus, quae nostro inseruiunt scopo. sequitur in sequente. §. III. Descriptio mentis hvmanae in specie. Mens humana est. substantia mere actuosa et immaterialis, commercio corporis uiui et organici cui inest. Intelligens et ex intentione Operans Propter determinatum et sibi conscium finem.

Nota I. Commercium corporis et mentis consistit in his quod (1)  corpore utatur pro subiecto cui inest (2)  Pro instrumento suae operationis et medio. Nota II. Instrumentum et medium in hoc differunt; instrumentum adplicatur ad finem practice, et medium adhibetur ad finem Theoretice consequendum. but to what we are supposed to do in order to attain that end. The phrase “an end that it intends to attain” could also mean “an end that it intends should follow,” if consequi is taken as intransitive rather than intransitive. 22 It is unclear how this would follow, unless Amo means this only of every spirit which is an efficient cause. However, he makes clear that he means the assertion without restriction at the beginning of his Tractatus, where he says that since every being other than God is produced by an efficient cause, every being other than God depends on an intention. Thus Amo

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  169 Corollary 1. Every efficient cause must know itself, its operations, and the thing that is supposed to come about.22 Corollary 2. Every active entity, in which there is consciousness of itself, of its operations, and of other things, is a spirit. Explanation 5. Spirit is immaterial, i.e., it has nothing material in its essence and its properties. Reason. Of two contrary opposites, one cannot contain and possess the other, since contrary opposites exclude from each other the same genus, the same species, and the same denomination. §2 Up to this point, we have considered at least those things about spirit that serve our aim. There follows, in the following §3 a DESCRIPTION OF THE HUMAN MIND IN PARTICULAR: The human mind is:  a purely active and immaterial substance which, by commerce with the living and organic body in which it is present, understands and operates from intention on account of a determinate end of which it is conscious. Note 1. The commerce of the body and the mind consists in these things: that it uses the body (1) as the subject in which it is present, and (2) as an instrument and medium of its operation. Note 2. Instrument and medium differ in that an instrument is applied to achieving an end practically, while a medium is used to attain an end theoretically.23 is denying that bodies can be efficient causes, even of events in other bodies. It is not obvious what Amo thinks are the grounds for this conclusion. Presumably bodies can still be instrumental causes, used by God or by finite spirits. See §3 of this Member on the human body as an instrument. 23 Or “to an end which is to follow practically [resp. theoretically].” Presumably to attain an end theoretically is to come to know it, when it is not the object immediately given but e.g., is inferred as a cause of the object immediately given.

170  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Nota III. Duae dantur partes essentiales hominis mens et [9]‌corpus. de mente dictum est. ad corpus quod adtinet est: elegantissimum e diuersis organis uitalibus et animalibus a creatore primum fabrefactum, et dehinc quoque per generationem propagatum. Sunt uerba D. Christian. Vater in sua physiolog. Sect. IIX. C. III. de corpore humano Th. I. §. IV. Continens varias spiritvvm denominationes. Spirituum nomine ueniunt (1) materia (2) spiritus proprie sic dictus. Spiritus materiales sunt antiquis spiritus naturales, uitales, et animales de quibus uide Senert. in scient. natural. Lib. IIX. cap. II. de corpore humano pag. m. 671. Spiritus proprie sic dictus est omne ens immateriale intelligens et ex intentione operans propter determinatum et sibi conscium finem. de quo in antecedentibus et Joh. Cleric. in Pneumatologia Sect. III. c. 3. §. 14. aliique. uarias fortiuntur denominationes, uocantur enim Intelligentiae, mentes, animae et generaliori uocabulo spiritus intelligentes. Nota I. Intelligentiae et mentes differunt per accidens, non per se. mentes dicuntur: spiritus hominum adhuc in suis corporibus uel ab eisdem superstites et separatae. v.c. mentes beatorum et damnatorum. uocantur etiam, umbrae et animae. de his Propertius:f Sunt aliquid manes, lethum non omnia finit. vid. Mizald in appendic. ad. centurias. memorabil. Aph. 290. Nota II. Neque desunt qui nomine animae tertiam quandam hominis partem essentialem intelligunt & sibi fingunt, quam litem nostramg non facimus vid. S. C. Teuber D. in moderato Iudicio de quaestione theologica an tres dentur partes hominis essentiales. f The original printing: propertius, not capitalized. g The original printing: nostam. 24 Christian Vater, Physiologia experimentalis, second edition, Wittenberg: Zimmermann, 1712, p. 495. The distinction between vital and animal organs—​the latter being organs of sensation and locomotion—​is Galenic. 25 In Daniel Sennert, Epitome Naturalis Scientiae, editio ultima, Amsterdam:  Ravestein, 1651, Book VIII, Chapter 2, the passage cited is on p. 645, with discussion continuing through p. 647; Amo is apparently using a different edition. Sennert’s list of three kinds of spirit [πνεῦμα] is from Galen. 26 Joannis Clerici Pneumatologia, in his Opera philosophica, vol. 2, fourth edition, Amsterdam: De Lorme, 1710, Section 3, Chapter 3, §14, p. 108. But this paragraph says nothing about operating from intention. Le Clerc here refers back to his preface to the Pneumatologia, §1, p. 1, which defines spirits as “all beings endowed with intellect and will,” but also says nothing about operating from intention.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  171 Note 3. There are two essential parts of a human being, the mind and the body. The mind has already been discussed. Concerning the body, it is: “first most precisely crafted by the creator out of diverse vital and animal organs, and thereafter propagated through generation.” These are the words of Christian Vater in his Physiologia, Section 7, Chapter 3, “On the human body,” Thesis 1.24 §4 CONTAINING VARIOUS DENOMINATIONS OF SPIRITS Falling under the name “spirits” we have (1) matter, (2) spirit properly so called. Material spirits were for the ancients the natural, vital, and animal spirits, on which see Sennert, Epitome scientiae naturalis, Book 8, Chapter 2, De corpore humano, p. 671.25 Spirit properly so called is any immaterial, intelligent entity that operates from intention toward a determinate end that is known to it, about which [see] the preceding, and Jean Le Clerc, Pneumatologia, Section 3, Chapter 3, §14,26 and others. They receive different denominations: for they are called “intelligences,” “minds,” “souls,” and, by a more general term, “intelligent spirits.” Note 1. Intelligences and minds differ per accidens, not per se. The spirits of human beings are called “minds,” whether still in their bodies or surviving and separated from them, e.g. the minds of the blessed and the damned. They are also called shadows and souls. About these Propertius writes: “Ghosts are something [real]. Death does not finish all” (see Mizauld, in the appendix to his Centuriae, Aphorism 290).27 Note 2. Nor are there lacking those who by the name “soul” understand and imagine a third essential part of man. This quarrel we will not make our own; see S. C. Teuber’s Moderatum judicium de quaestione theologica.28 Amo has an elaborate theory of intentions, which he develops at length in the Tractatus. It is not clear how far Amo shares this theory with other authors, but it does not seem to be in Le Clerc, certainly not in these passages. 27 This is the beginning of Propertius Elegies IV, 7. Amo cites it from Antoine Mizauld (1510–​1578), Centuriae IX Memorabilium utilium, ac iucundorum in aphorismos arcanorum omnis generis locupletes, perpulchre digestae;Accessit his Appendix nonullorum Secretorum, Experimentorum, Antidotorumque contra varios morbos tam ex libris manuscriptis quam typis excusis collecta; we have used the edition Frankfurt: Wechel, 1592, in which this is on p. 267, the last page of the Appendix. 28 Samuel Christian Teuber, Moderatum judicium de quaestione theologica, an dentur tres partes hominis essentiales?, Magdeburg: Seidel, 1708. There are texts of St. Paul which contrast “soul” and “spirit,” and seem to imply a tripartite anthropology, in which a human being is composed of body, soul, and spirit; these texts were sometimes taken up by Christian theologians trying to develop a distinctively Christian anthropology, and contrasted with bipartite theories on which a human being is composed of body and soul or of body and spirit. Teuber endorses the standard bipartite theory.

172  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Haec circa subiectum theseos, sequitur:

[10] Membrvm II. Continens declarationes idearum a parte praedicati et in specie De oppositis praedicati sensione et facvltate sentiendi.

Praemonitum. Omnis propositio uti in Scholis notum, affirmatiua est uel negatiua. affirmatiua quando praesentia, negatiua, quando absentia praedicati in subiecto indicatur; Vtrumque fit aut simpliciter aut secundum quid. simpliciter uel secundum se adfirmatur, quando totius praedicati praesentia sine omni limitatione seu exceptione in subiecto indicatur. v.c. omnis spiritus intelligit. Secundum quid adfirmamus, quando iudicamus praedicatum quoad partem subiecto inesse. v.c. homo est mortalis.h nempe quoad corpus, non quoad mentem. vid. Math. X, 28. eadem est ratio negandi, simpliciter negamus quando totum praedicatum cum suis partibus a subiecto remouemus, partim seu secundum quid, quando partem saltem praedicati a subiecto remouemus:  in hac nostra thesi totum praedicatum bimembre a subiecto toto remouemus, scilicet sensionem et facultatem sentiendi. Sed quia aliquid ab alio remoueri dicimus, declarandum est id, quod ab alio tanquam subiecto non capace remouetur i.e. quid sensio, et facultas sentiendi.

§. I. Qvid sensio sit explicatvr. Sensio est in genere: rerum immediate praesentium et [11] materialium, proprietatibus sensibilibus realiter afficii per organa sensoria.j Not. I. Sensio consideratur (1) uel logice uel physice. Logice omnis sensio est uel mediata uel immediata. Illam ideam uocant, haec in mox sequentibus h The original printing: moratalis. i The original printing: offici. j The original printing: sensosoria.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  173 So much for the subject of the thesis. Next follows:

MEMBER 2 Containing clarifications of the ideas on the side of the predicate, and in particular ON THE OPPOSITES OF THE PREDICATE, SENSATION AND THE FACULTY OF SENSING Notice. Every proposition, as is known in the Schools, is either affirmative or negative: affirmative, when the presence of the predicate in the subject is indicated; negative, when the absence is indicated. And both come about either simpliciter or secundum quid: we affirm simpliciter or secundum se when the presence of the whole predicate in the subject is indicated without any limitation or exception, e.g. “Every spirit is intelligent.” We affirm secundum quid when we judge the predicate is in the subject with respect to a part of it, e.g., “Man is mortal,” namely with respect to the body, not with respect to the mind (see Matthew 10:28). Likewise with negating:  we negate simpliciter when we remove the whole predicate, with [all] its parts, from the subject; we negate partially or secundum quid, when we remove at least a part of the predicate from the subject. In this thesis of ours, we remove the whole bipartite predicate, namely sensation and the faculty of sensing, from the whole subject. But because we are saying that something is removed from something else, we must clarify what it is that is removed from something else as from a subject not capable [of receiving it]: i.e. [we must clarify] what sensation and the faculty of sensing are. §1 WHAT SENSATION IS, EXPLAINED Sensation is, in general: to be really affected, through the sensory organs, by the sensible properties of immediately present and material things. Note 1. Sensation is considered either logically or physically. Logically, every sensation is either mediate or immediate. The former they call an “idea,” the latter will be explained shortly. Physically, every sensation is either

174  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations clarebit. Physice omnis sensio est uel grata uel ingrata, utraque est uel interna uel externa quibus de rebus in logicis nostris. Nota II. Sensiones internae sunt animi pathemata adfectus de quibus vid. Dn. Des Cartes in Tract. de passionib. anim.k Nota III. Sensatio, sensius, et sensio, mihi sunt synonyma. §. II. Facultas sentiendi quid. His praemissis facile describitur facultas sentiendi, nempe quod sit:  Organici et vivi nostri corporis talis dispositio, qua mediante animal rebus materialibus et sensibilibus eique immediate praesentibus afficitur. Nota. Hanc facultatem sentiendi antiqui uocarunt animam sensitiuam disserte distinctam ab anima rationali et vegetante, de quibus vid. Senert. in Epitom. Scient. Natur. de rationali Lib. IIX. c. I. de vegetativa. Lib. VI.  c.2 item Essais de physique I.  partie. Chap. IIX.  des sensations pag. m. 103. Les animaux sont donc composez des corps et d’ame sensitiue qui est leur forme, mais aux hommes, cette ame sensitiue est subordonée à l’ame immortelle. et etant une substance moyenne entre le corps et cette ame immortelle, elle les unit parfaitement &c.

Membrvm III. Continens descriptionem τῆς ἀπαθείας seu praedicati Theseos. [12] §. I. consideramus (1)  respectu facultatis sentiendi (2)  ipsius sensionis. de illa in praesenti agendum, de altera in sequente. §3. ̓ πάθειανl Α

k We have inserted a paragraph break. l The original printing: Απαθειαν. 29 A programmatic reference ahead to Amo’s Tractatus, which would be published only in 1738, but which Amo may well have had in draft in 1734; the promise is fulfilled in Tractatus, General Part, Chapter IV, p. 41.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  175 agreeable or disagreeable, and each of these is either internal or external, about which matters [we will explain] in our Logic.29 Note 2. Internal sensations are the passions or affections of the soul, about which see Descartes in his Passions of the Soul. Note 3. “Sensation,” “sensing,” and “sense” are for me synonymous. §2 THE FACULTY OF SENSING, WHAT With these things premissed the faculty of sensing will be easily described. It is, namely, a disposition of our organic and living body, by means of which [disposition] the animal is affected by things material and sensible and immediately present. Note. The ancients called this faculty of sensing the “sensitive soul,” clearly distinguished from the rational and vegetative souls, about which see Sennert, Epitome scientiae naturalis, Book 8, Chapter 1, on the rational soul, and Book 6, Chapter 2, on the vegetative soul; also [Edme Didier], Essais de physique, Part 1, Chapter 8, on sensations, p. 103: “Thus animals are composed of a body and a sensitive soul that is their form. But in human beings this sensitive soul is subordinate to the immortal soul, and, being a middle substance between the body and this immortal soul, it unites them perfectly, etc.”30

MEMBER 3 Containing a description of impassivity, or of the predicate of the thesis. §1 We are considering impassivity (1) with respect to the faculty of sensing, and (2) with respect to sensation itself. We will treat of the former in the present section [i.e. §2], and of the latter in §3.

30 Sennert’s Book 8, Chapter 1, pp. 621–​41 in our edition of reference, is on the rational soul, and Book 6, Chapter 2, pp. 455–​63, on the vegetative soul. (Book 7, Chapter 1, pp. 529–​42, is on the sensitive soul.) The quote is from [Edme Didier], Essais de physique, prouvez par l’expérience et confirmez par l’écriture sainte, v.1, Paris: Pralard, 1684, p. 103.

176  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Nota. Praedicatum huius Theseos est bimembre, quia duplicem continet ideam, facultatis sentiendi et sensionis, in subiecto non apto absentiam.

§. II. ̓ πάθειαm respectu facultatis sentiendi quid sit. Α ̓Απάθειαn respectu facultatis sentiendi est Absentia talis dispositionis in subiecto non apto, qua mediante animal rebus sensibilibus, et immediate praesentibus necnon materialibus affici debet.

Expositio unica. Subiectum non capax seu non aptum est:  Ens quod alterius entis Partes, proprietates, et effectus in se non admittit, eorum nec particeps fieri potest. Tale subiectum est uel spiritus uel materia. de spiritu sensionis incapace dictum est in membr. I. C. I. Cum suis expositionibus et earum adplicationibus. Ratione materiae distinguendum inter corpus uivum et uita priuatum; illud utique, hoc minime mediante sua dispositione sensione afficitur.

§. III.

̓ πάθειαo respectu sensionis.p Α

Sequitur ex ordine ἀπάθειαq respectu sensionis quae est: cuius uis sensionis in subiecto non apto (non sentiente) absentia. v. gr. Spiritus, lapis &c.

[13] §. IV. Quid ἀπάθειαr mentis humanae. His explicatis tandem quaeritur quid per ipsam thesin i.e. humanae mentis ἀπάθειανs intelligamus, nempe:  absentiam facultatis sentiendi sensionumque immediatarum in mente humana. m The original printing: Απαθεια. n The original printing: Απαθεια. o The original printing: Απαθεια. p In the original printing this is printed continuously with the following sentence, but it has the same logical functions as the headings of the previous and succeeding paragraphs, and so we print it as a heading. q The original printing: απαθεια. r The original printing: απαθεια. s The original printing: απαθειαν.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  177 Note. The predicate of this thesis is bipartite, since it contains a twofold idea, the absence of the faculty of sensing and of sensation in a subject that is not suited to having them. §2 What impassivity with respect to the faculty of sensing is. Impassivity with respect to the faculty of sensing is the absence of a disposition by means of which [disposition] the animal would be affected by sensible, immediately present and material things, in a subject that is not suited to having [such a disposition]. Sole Explanation. A  non-​capable or non-​suited subject is:  an entity that does not admit the parts, properties, and effects of another entity into itself, and cannot come to partake in them. Such a subject is either a spirit or matter. On spirit’s incapacity for sensing we have already spoken in Member 1, §1, with its Explanations and their Applications. With respect to matter we must distinguish between a living body and a body that is deprived of life: the former is, while the latter is not, affected by sensation by means of its disposition. §3 Impassivity with respect to sensation. It follows in order what impassivity with respect to sensation is: the absence of any sensation in a subject that is not suited to having it (i.e. non-​ sentient), e.g. a spirit, a stone, etc. §4 What the impassivity of the human mind is. With these things explained it can finally be asked what we understand by the thesis itself, i.e., the impassivity of the human mind. It is, namely, the absence of the faculty of sensing and of immediate sensations in the human mind.31

31 “Immediate” sensations as opposed to ideas, which are recollected sensations, representing something which is no longer present to sensation as if it were still present.

178  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations

CAP. II. Continens applicationes eorvm qvae in antecedentibus late dedvximvs. Status controuersiae. Homo res materiales sentit non quoad mentem sed quoadt corpus uiuum et organicum. Haec dicuntur et defenduntur Contra Cartesium eiusque sententiam in Epistol. part. I. Epist. XXIX. ubi ita habet: Nam cum duo sint in anima humana, ex quibus pendet tota cognitio, quam de eius natura habere possumus, quorum unum est quod cogitet, alterum quod unita corpori possit cum illo agere et Pati. Ad quae uerba ita monemus et dissentimus; mentem cum corpore mediante mutua unione agere, concedimus; Sed cum corpore pati negamus.

Nota. pati et sentire in rebus uiuis synt Synonima. in rebus uero uita priuatis sentire est; mutationes aliunde uenientes quoad quantitatem et qualitatem in se admittere. i. e. aliunde modificari et determinari.

Monitum I. Sed ipse aperte contrarium dicit. Loc. cit. part I. Epistol. 99. in examine programmat. praeced. ubi naturam [14] animae in sola facultate cogitandi ponit; atqui cogitare est actio mentis, non passio.

Contra Senert. in Scient. natur. Lib. IIX. c. I. de anima rationali ubi: et si uero anima humana, omnibus facultatibus quas hactenus animae uegetanti et sentienti tribuimus, pollet: tamen duas &c. item Lib. VII. C. I. p. m. 562. de anima sentiente: Sentire enim est opus animae. t The original printing: quaad. 32 René Descartes, Epistolae Part I, Letter 29, to Princess Elizabeth, p. 59, AT III, 664. 33 We might have expected Amo to say that in things deprived of life, to suffer is to admit within themselves such changes. Perhaps he means that such things can be said to “sense” only equivocally, in that they admit within themselves such changes.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  179

CHAPTER 2 CONTAINING APPLICATIONS OF THOSE THINGS THAT WE HAVE DEDUCED AT LENGTH ABOVE The state of the controversy. Human beings sense material things not with respect to their mind but with respect to their living and organic body. These things are said and defended against Descartes, and against his view in the Letters, Part I, Letter 29, where he says: “For as there are two things in the human soul on which all the knowledge that we are able to have of its nature depends, one of which is that it thinks, the other that, united to a body, it is able to act and to suffer together with it.”32 In reply to these words we caution and dissent as follows: we concede that the mind acts together with the body by means of a mutual union. But we deny that it suffers together with the body. Note. “To suffer” and “to sense” are, in living things, synonymous. But in things that are deprived of life to sense is to admit within themselves changes with respect to quantity and quality that come from elsewhere, i.e., to be modified and determined from elsewhere.33 Remark 1. But Descartes manifestly states the contrary to his own view, loc. cit., Part I, Letter 99, in the examination of the preceding program,34 where he places the nature of the soul in the faculty of thinking alone, although thinking is an action of the mind, not a passion.35 Against Sennert, in his Epitome scientiae naturalis, Book 8, Chapter 1, on the rational soul, where [he writes]: “but even if the human soul, with all of the faculties we have thus far attributed to the vegetative and sensitive soul, exerts power, nevertheless [there are] two” etc. See also Book 7, Chapter 1, p.562, on the sensitive soul: “For to sense is the work of the soul.” 34 Part I, Letter 99 (in both editions), pp.  316–​32 in the Amsterdam edition, is the Notae in Programma, on a text of Descartes’s former disciple, Henricus Regius. 35 That thinking is an action of the mind, not a passion, is Amo’s own view, not Descartes’s: Descartes recognizes understanding and judgment and volition as kinds of thinking, and maintains that understanding is passive and judgment and volition are active.

180  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Monitum II. Sed sibi contrarium statuit dl. p.  m. 563. uerbis:  recipere speciem sensibilem est organi; receptum iudicare est animae. recipere speciem sensibilem est sentire, atqui hoc competit organo, per consequens et corpori, nam organa competunt non menti sed corpori. Item sentire et iudicare ipse distinguit, illud organis, hoc menti tribuens.

Item contra Ioh. Cleric. lib. IV. physicor. de Plantis et animalibus C. X. de animalium sensib. et motib. §2. Monitum III. Sed ipse sibi contradicit dl. §3. subsequente. Vbi ait tria esse distinguenda (1) actio obiecti in organa (2) organi passio et (3) inquit: moto organo, percellitur mens, sentitque mens corpus suum affectum fuisse. Si enim mens sentiret, oportuit ita eum dixisse:  Sentitque mens se adfectam fuisse; Nam si sentit mens corpus suum adfectum fuisse, sentit seu potius intelligit se ipsam non esse adfectam. Sed confundit actum intelligendi et negotium sentiendi: idemque est ac si dixisset: Intelligitque mens corpus suum esse adfectum. Item contra Georg. Daniel Coschwiz in organism. et Mechanism. S. I. C. VIII. Th. 3. Contraque alios complures.

Sentiunt nobiscum Aristotel. Lib. II. de generat. et corrupt. c. 9. p. m. 49. τῆς μὲν γὰρ ὕλης τὸ πάσχειν ἐστὶ καὶ τὸ κινεῖσθαιu etc. Io. Frid. Teichmeyer. in Element. Philos. nat. experiment. [15] C. III. de princip. physic. p. m. 18. uerbis: per sensum intelligimus etc. Io. Christophor. Stvrm. in Physic. Hypoth. Lib. I. Seu part. General. Sect. I. C. II. in V. Epilog. Item dl pag. III. 232. et qui sequuntur ibidem. u The original printing: τῆς μὲν γαρ ὕλης τὸ πάσχειν ἐστι καὶ τὸ κινεῖθαι. 36 The first passage that Amo cites from Sennert here is, in our edition of reference, on p. 629 (with discussion continuing to p. 630). The second and third passages are both on p. 640, and are part of a connected discussion of the ratio sentiendi. Sennert attributes sensation to the soul; he does not accept Amo’s premise that to receive the sensible species is to sense. 37 Physica IV, 10, §2, p. 165 in Joannis Clerici Physica sive de rebus corporeis libri quinque, Volumen secundum, Operum Philosophicorum Tomus IV, Amsterdam: Gallet, 1698. Le Clerc says: “Sense considered in general is nothing other than the faculty of sensing; which, inasmuch as it uses various organs, receives various names. The Scholastics for this reason say that there is an internal sense, which they also call the common sense, and external or particular senses. They claim that sensations are transmitted [or reported] by these [external senses] to the internal and common sense, which discerns them. But, as we have said, it is a single faculty which uses various organs. For one and the same Mind in us senses what is transmitted [or reported] to it by the ears, eyes, nostrils, touch and sight [sic, but he needs a word for taste or its organ], as we have shown in the Pneumatology.” 38 Physica IV, 10, §3, also p. 165.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  181 Remark 2. But he establishes the contrary of his own view, ibid. p. 563, with the words “to receive the sensible species belongs to an organ; to judge what is received belongs to the soul.”36 To receive the sensible species is to sense, and this belongs to an organ, and consequently to a body, for organs belong not to the mind but to the body. Again, Sennert himself distinguishes between sensing and judging, attributing the former to the organs, and the latter to the mind. Likewise, against Jean Le Clerc, Book IV of the Physica, on plants and animals, Chapter 10, on the senses and motions of animals, §2.37 Remark 3. But he contradicts himself in the following §3, where he says that three things are to be distinguished: (1) the action of the object upon the organs, (2)  the passion of the organ, and—​he says—​(3) “when the organ has been moved, the mind is struck, and the mind senses that its body has been affected.”38 For if the mind were to sense, he should have spoken thus, “and the mind senses that it itself has been affected”: for if the mind senses that its body has been affected, it senses, or—​better—​understands, that it itself has not been affected. But he confuses the act of understanding and the function of sensing: and it is the same as if he had said “and the mind understands that its body has been affected.” Likewise against Georg Daniel Coschwitz, in Organismus et mechanismus in homine vivo obvius et stabilitus, Section 1, Chapter 8, Thesis 3,39 and against many others. There agree with us:  Aristotle On Generation and Corruption, Book 2, Chapter  9, p.  49, “it belongs to matter to suffer and to be moved,” etc.;40 Hermann Friedrich Teichmeyer, in the Elementa philosophiae naturalis experimentalis Chapter  3, on physical principles, p.18, in the words, “By sense we understand” etc.;41 and Johann Christoph Sturm, in the Physica electiva sive hypothetica, Book 1 (i.e. the General Part), Section 1, Chapter 2, “V. Epilogue,” as well as [paragraph?] 3, p.232 and following.42 39 Georg Daniel Coschwitz, Organismus et mechanismus in homine vivo obvius et stabilitus seu hominis vivi consideratio physiologica, Leipzig: Lanckis, 1725, pp. 196–​97. Thesis 3 says “Sensation considered in general, and inseparably conjoined with voluntary motion, is, according to the view of the illustrious Stahl, an action of the rational soul by which, mechanically informed about external things through its organs, it partly knows [these external things], partly puts its will which has been formed about them into effect.” 40 Aristotle On Generation and Corruption II, 9 335b29–​31: “It belongs to matter to suffer and to be moved, whereas to move and to act [or produce] belongs to another power.” The context has nothing specifically to do with sensation. 41 Hermanni Friderici Teichmeyeri, Elementa philosophiae naturalis experimentalis, Jena: Bielck, 1717, Part I, Chapter 3, p. 18: “By sense we understand every perception in properly disposed organs, either by themselves or equipped [with instruments of observation], and aroused by external objects.” 42 Johann Christoph Sturm, Physica electiva sive hypothetica, Nuremberg: Endter, 1697. “Tomus I” or “Part I” contains the general part of physics. It is not entirely obvious what passages Amo is

182  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations

Membrvm. vnicvm. §1 Thesis I. negatiua. Mens humana non rebus sensibilibus afficitur. Expositio. Thesis idem innuit ac si dicas: mens humana rebus sensibilibus non afficitur, quamuis suo corpori cui inest proxime praesentibus; Sed sensiones in corpore ortas, intelligit, et intellectas in suas adhibet operationes. uid. Essais de physique chapitre. IIX. p. 107.

Nota. In homine logice considerato confundenda non sunt Mens, mentis operatio, idea et sensio immediata; mens et eius operatio immateriales sunt; nam qualis substantia talis substantiae proprietas atqui mens est immaterialis per ea quae diximus Cap. I. m. I. §. I. etc. ergo et sua proprietas. Idea est ens compositum; est enim quando mens sensionem in corpore praeexistentem, sibi praesentem sistit, estque sensio repraesentata, quid in immediata sensio sit uid. Cap. 1. m. 2. §. 1. cum notis subiectis.

Probatio Theseos I. Quidquid sentit, illud uiuit, quidquid uiuit nutritur, quidquid uiuit et nutritur augmentatur, quidquid huius modi est, tandem in sua Prima principia resoluitur, quidquid in sua prima principia resoluitur, est principiatum, omne principiatum habet suas partes constitutiuas, quidquid eius modi est, est corpus diuisibile si igitur mens humana sentit, sequitur quod sit corpus diuisibile. Probatio Theseos II. Nullus spiritus res materiales sentit; atqui mens humana est Spiritus ergo res materiales non sentit. referring to. Part I, Section I, Chapter 2, “On the common matter of all natural bodies,” V: Epilogue, is on pp. 65–​67: Sturm says there that matter is purely passive and cannot receive any active power, although he does not seem to say there that souls do not have passive powers. Page 232 is in the “Digressory Appendix” to Part I, Section I: within this Appendix, Amo may intend to refer to paragraph IV, pp. 232–​34, much of which is on sensation, rather than to paragraph III, pp. 231–​32. 43 In the 1738 Tractatus, in a note on the distinction between intention, will, and natural instinct, Amo refers to this Member. See Tractatus, Special Part, Section I, Chapter II, Member I, §2, under heading II, p. 70.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  183

THE SOLE MEMBER43 §144

Thesis 1: negative. The human mind is not affected by sensible things. Explanation. The intention of the thesis is the same as if you were to say: the human mind is not affected by sensible things, even if they are proximately present to the body in which it is, but rather it understands the sensations that arise in the body, and, once they are understood, it applies them in its operations. See [Edme Didier] Essais de physique, Chapter 8, p.107.45 Note. In considering man logically, mind, operation of the mind, idea, and immediate sensation are not to be confused. Mind and its operations are immaterial, for as a substance is, so is the property of the substance: but the mind is immaterial, according to what we said in Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, etc., so its property is also immaterial. An idea is a composite entity, for it exists when the mind sets up as present to itself a sensation that has preexisted in the body, and it is a represented sensation. On what immediate sensation is, see Chapter 1, Member 2, §1, with the notes under it. First Proof of the Thesis. Whatever senses, lives; whatever lives, is nourished; whatever lives and is nourished, grows; whatever is of this sort, is in the end resolved into its first principles; whatever is resolved into its first principles, is derived from principles; everything derived from principles has its constitutive parts; whatever is of this sort, is a divisible body; therefore if the human mind senses, it follows that it is a divisible body. Second Proof of the Thesis. No spirit senses material things; but the human mind is a spirit; therefore, it does not sense material things.

44 We supply this heading. Early modern printings, when they have a numbered list, §1, §2, §3 etc. or (1), (2), (3) etc., often simply skip the first heading “§1” or “(1).” 45 Didier says here that the sensitive and rational soul remember and reason by considering the images or sensible species present in the imagination (where this apparently means, present in some particular bodily organ). He is not talking here about what happens in sensation, but about what the soul does afterwards in thinking about things that have been previously sensed.

184  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations [16] Maior probatur Cap. I. m. I. §. I. exposit. I. cum notis et applicationib. subiectis. minor nullam admittit contradictionem.

Nota I. Vivere et sentire sunt duo praedicata inseparabilia, ratio est haec inversio:  omne quod vivit necessario sentit, et omne sentiens necessario vivit; ita ut unius praesentia alterius necessariam importet praesentiam.

Nota II. Synonyma non sunt vivere et existere. Omne quod vivit existit, sed non omne existens vivit, spiritus enim et lapis existunt, sed minus recte vivere dicuntur. spiritus enim existit, et operatur cum intelligentia, materia existit, et actionem agentis recipit. sed homo et animal existunt agunt, vivunt et sentiunt. Probatio Theseos III. Non timeatis, ait Salvator noster, ab occidentibus corpus, qui tamen animam occidere non possunt Math. X, 28. exinde ita: Quidquid occiditur et occidi potest, illud vivere necesse est. (Nam occidi est; aliunde per violentiam vita privari) si igitur corpus occiditur et occidi potest, sequitur quod vivat, si vivit sentit, si sentit, sequitur quod facultate sentiendi gaudeat. vivere enim et sentire sunt per perpetuo in eod[e]‌m subiecto et principio coniuncta. Nota. Consentiunt medicorum chorus aliique quorum sententia est sensionem fiere in succo et genere neruoso, qui succus nerveus antiquis spiritus animales vid. Illustr. Dn. de Berger in Physiolog. Lib. I. de natura human. c. XXI. de secret. motuque succi nervos. p. 277. item Excellentiss. Dn. meus praeses in physic. sua experim. compendios. edit. II. C. V. Q. XXV. Essais de Physique I. partie chap. IIX. Des sensations §. 5. p. 102. Senert. in Epitom. scient. natur. Lib. IIX. c. 2. pag. m. 671.

46 It is not clear whether this means specifically “by another person” or more generally “by another thing.” 47 Among “the ancients,” this is in particular Galen’s doctrine. See Chapter 1, Member 1, §4, and the footnote there. The “fluid of the nerves” is to be distinguished from the “nature of the nerves,” i.e., the nerve-​fibers themselves. 48 Berger, Physiologia, p. 277. 49 Martin Gotthelf Löscher, Physica theoretica et experimentalis compendiosa, second edition, Wittenberg: Zimmermann, 1728, pp. 262–​63. Löscher says there that this fluid of the nerves is what older writers called the “animal spirits.”

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  185 The major premise is proved at Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Explanation 1, with the notes and applications under it, while the minor premise does not admit of contradiction. Note 1. To live and to sense are two inseparable predicates. The reason is this conversion: everything that lives necessarily senses, and everything that senses necessarily lives, so that the presence of the one implies the necessary presence of the other. Note 2. To live and to exist are not synonyms. Everything that lives exists, but not everything that exists lives, for a spirit and a stone exist, but are less rightly said to live. For a spirit exists, and operates with understanding; matter exists, and receives the action of the agent. But a human and an animal exist, act, live, and sense. Third Proof of the Thesis. Our Savior says, “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28); from which we proceed as follows: whatever is killed and can be killed, necessarily lives. (For to be killed is to be deprived of life by another46 through violence.) If therefore the body is killed and can be killed, it follows that it lives; if it lives, it senses; it follows that it enjoys the faculty of sensing; for to live and to sense are perpetually conjoined in the same subject and principle. Note. There agree [with us] the chorus of physicians and others whose opinion is that sensation arises in the fluid and the nature of the nerves; this fluid of the nerves is what the ancients called the “animal spirits.”47 See the illustrious von Berger, in his Physiologia, Book I, on human nature, Chapter 21, on the secretion and motion of the fluid of the nerves, p. 277;48 also, my excellent President in his Physica theoretica et experimentalis compendiosa, second edition, Chapter 5, Question 25;49 [Edme Didier] Essais de physique, Part I, Chapter 8, on sensations, §5, p. 102;50 Sennert in the Epitome scientiae naturalis, Book 8, Chapter 2, p. 671.51 50 Didier speaks here of a “vital light” or “vital spirit” which is some sort of vehicle of the sensitive soul. But this passage does not say anything explicit about sensation, much less say that it is the body rather than the soul that senses. And Didier is speaking here of a spirit that is carried in the blood, rather than in the nerves. 51 Sennert, Epitome, Book VIII, ­chapter 2. For Sennert on the animal spirits, see especially, in our edition of reference, pp. 646–​47. Sennert has some discussion of the anatomy of the brain, esp. pp. 671–​73, and a bit about the nerves scattered in his discussion of the sense-​organs before that, starting p. 663, but there is nothing obvious saying that sensation happens in the animal spirits rather than the soul.

186  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Exemplum. Eximie huc facit effatum Friderici sapientis [17] principis Electoris gloriasissimae memoriae Academiae nostrae quae hic Wittebergae uiget conditoris munificentissimi; qui in extremov uitae halitu constitutus, interrogatusque quomodo haberet? respondit, corpus suos pati dolores, sed mentem esse tranquillam; welcher auf dein Tod-​B ett gefragt wurde /​wie er sich befände? Antwortete er: Der Geist ist ruhig aber der Leib leydet Schmertzen. vid Brückner in Sächsischen Helden-​ Saal /​in vita Friederichs des weisen /​vierdten Churfürsten zu Sachsen Meissnischer Linie. §. II. Thesis II. Nec facultas sentiendi menti inest. Probatio. Cui competit circulatio sanguinis, illi et competit principium vitae; cui hoc competit, illi etiam facultas sentiendi; Atqui circulatio sanguinis, & vitae principium corpori competunt vid. Illustr. DN. De Berger dl. c.  V.  in fin. p.  112. ibid. p.  56. Item excellentiss. DN.  meus Praeses cit. loc. C. V. Q XII. Christian. Vater. in Physiolog. S. IV. c. 2. de vita et nutritione th. 1.  in fin. Item diserte distinguit sacer codex τὴν ψυχὴν ἀπὸ τοῦ πνεύματοςw vid. Job. XII.  v.  10. ubi septuaginta viri:  εἰ ἐν χειρὶ αὐτοῦ ψυχὴ πάντων τῶν ζώντων καὶ πνεῦμα παντὸς ἀνθρώπουx Ita D. Lutherus dass in seiner Hand ist die Seele alles des /​das da lebet /​und der Geist alles Fleisches eines ieglichen. Item vocabulum τῆς ψυχῆς indicat

v The original printing: etremo. w The original printing: τὴν ψὺχην ἀπο τού πενεὺματος. x The original printing: Εἰ ἐν χειρὶ αυτὸν ψυχὴν πάντῶν ζωντῶν καὶ πνευμα παντὸς ανδρωποὺ. Besides the usual small mistakes, the printed πάντῶν with its impossible double accent is clearly a mistake for the correct πάντων τῶν. The correct Septuagint text of Job 12:10 has εἰ μὴ ἐν χειρὶ αὐτοῦ ψυχὴ πάντων τῶν ζώντων καὶ πνεῦμα παντὸς ἀνθρώπου, so it has a negation and a question mark that the original printing of the Impassivity does not. We have decided not to restore the correct Septuagint text in this case, since it seems unlikely that the omission of the negative μὴ is a mere printer’s error, and the Greek text cited here seems to fit with Luther’s translation. But the meaning is ultimately the same: the Septuagint text, with the negation, is a rhetorical question, “Is not the soul of every living thing, and the spirit of all mankind, in his hand?”

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  187 Example. This was excellently expressed by Prince Elector Friedrich the Wise, of most glorious memory, the most munificent founder of our University52 which thrives here in Wittenberg, who, drawing the final breath of his life, was asked how he fared. He responded that the body was suffering its pains, but that the mind was at peace (“welcher auf dem Tod-​ Bett gefragt wurde wie er sich befände? Antwortete er: Der Geist ist ruhig aber der Leib leydet Schmertzen”). See Brückner in his Sächsischer Helden-​ Saal (p.532), in the life of Friedrich the Wise, the Fourth Elector of Saxony of the Meissener line.53 §2 Thesis 2. Nor is the faculty of sensing present in the mind. Proof. Whatever admits of the circulation of blood admits of the principle of life; whatever admits of this, admits of the faculty of sensing. But the body admits of the circulation of blood and of the principle of life (see the illustrious von Berger, ibid. at the end of Chapter 5, p.112, also p.56;54 see also my most excellent President, loc. cit. Chapter  5 Question 12;55 Christian Vater in Physiologia Section 4, Chapter 2, on life and nutrition, at the end of Thesis 1).56 Likewise the Holy Book clearly distinguishes the soul [ψυχή] from the spirit [πνεῦμα]; see Job 12:10, where the Septuagint translates “In his hand is the soul [ψυχή] of every living thing, and the spirit [πνεῦμα] of all mankind,” and so Dr. Luther translates “in seiner Hand ist die Seele alles des, das da lebet, und der Geist alles Fleisches eines ieglichen.” Likewise this term 52 Amo and Kraus and Löscher consistently say “Academia,” a classical and rhetorically elevated word, instead of the standard but non-​classical “universitas.” But they are talking about a university, not about the Academies of Sciences which coexisted with the university system at this time, and we have consistently translated “university.” 53 Siegmund von Birken (incorrectly cited by Amo, or his printer, as “Brückner”), Chur-​ und fürstlicher sächsischer Helden-​Saal, Nuremberg: Hofmann, 1677, p. 532. Friedrich the Wise was indeed the founder of the University of Wittenberg, and the patron of Luther and Melanchthon, and gave Melanchthon license to reform the university. Amo’s patrons, who were dukes of Braunschweig-Lüneburg and princes of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel but not electors of Saxony, were descendants of Friedrich’s sister Margarete. 54 Berger, Physiologia, p. 112 (the last paragraph). Berger’s pp. 55–​56, his introductory paragraph on the circulation of the blood, is generally relevant. 55 Löscher, Physica, p. 251; this extremely brief Question asks “So how does the body live, and how is it preserved in its condition?” and answers “The preservation of the body is in accordance with [or comes to the same thing as] its life. But life consists in the motion of the humors, and chiefly in the circle [i.e., circulation] of the blood.” 56 Vater, Physiologia, p. 346, defining life (for his present purposes) as an attribute of bodies rather than of spirits.

188  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations principium vitae animalium Gen. I. v. 24. Ibid. cap. IX. carnem in sanguine animae non comedite! vc. v.  4. πλὴν κρέαςy etc. allein esset das Fleisch nicht /​so noch lebet in seinem Blute. ibid. τὴν ψυχὴν τοῦ ἀν θρώπουz reddidit D.  Lutherus des Menschen Leben. Item Proverb. 4.  Omni custodia serva cor tuum, quia ex ipso vita procedit, atqui cor cum circulo suo sanguinis ad corpus refertur. porro Levit. 17. Vita omnis est in sanguine; sed sanguis refertur ad corpus, adde Esais de physique I. partie chpitr. IIX.  des sensations p.  102  & 103. Haec cum ita sint, sequitur, quod principium vitae cum facultate sentiendi non menti; sed corpori competant.

§. III. Thesis III. Ergo sensio et facultas sentiendi corpori competunt. Probatio. Sensio est facultas sentiendi aut menti competunt, aut corpori, non menti, per late jam deducta. Ergo corpori, vid. probationes thes. I. & II. Nota finalis. Finis hujus dissertationis conscribendae, contrariae fuerunt sententiae quas vide cap. II. in formatione quaestionis. Item ne confundamus ea quae corpori et menti diverso respectu, conveniunt. Quidquid enim in mera mentis operatione consistit, illud soli menti, quidquid vero sensionem, facultatemque sentiendi supponit, conceptumque involuit materialem, illud corpori omnino tribuendum est. TANTUM.

y The original printing: πλῆν κρεὰς. z The original printing: τὴν ψυχὴν τοὺ ανδρωποὺ. 57 Didier, like Amo, cites this passage of Leviticus. Didier is trying to prove from scripture that the sensitive soul has its principal seat in the heart, from which the circulation of the blood distributes “vital light” to the body.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  189 ψυχή indicates the principle of life of animals in Genesis 1:24, and Genesis 9:4 says “But flesh with the life [literally ‘soul’] thereof, which is the blood thereof, you shall not eat,” “allein esset das Fleisch nicht so noch lebet in seinem Blute.” And Dr. Luther rendered ἡ ψυχὴ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου as “des Menschen Leben.” See also Proverbs 4:23, “Keep your heart with all diligence; for life goes forth from it”; but the heart with its circulation of blood belongs to the body. Further, in Leviticus 17, “all life is in the blood;” but the blood belongs to the body. See also [Edme Didier] Essais de physique, Part 1, Chapter 8, on sensations, pp. 102-​103.57 As these things are so, it follows that the principle of life along with the faculty of sensing belong not to the mind, but to the body. §3 Thesis 3. Therefore sensation and the faculty of sensing belong to the body. Proof. Sense and the faculty of sensing belong either to the mind or to the body. But not to the mind, as has already been shown at length, therefore to the body; see the proofs of Theses 1 and 2. Final note. The aims of writing this dissertation were the contrary opinions (for which see Chapter 2, in the formation of the question),58 and that we should avoid confusing those things which are appropriate to the body and the mind in different respects. For whatever consists in a mere operation of the mind is to be attributed to the mind alone, but whatever presupposes sensation and the faculty of sensing, and involves a material concept, is to be attributed entirely to the body. END.

58 I.e., the passages of Descartes, Sennert, and Le Clerc there cited. As this earlier text shows, Amo means that each of these writers said things contrary to himself (not merely contrary to Amo’s own preferred view) on the issue. A common aim of seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century dissertations was to bring out some respected author’s contradictions with himself or with an authority that he claims to follow.

190  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations [19] RECTOR et Consilivm academiae Vitembergensis pvblicvm Lectori Benevolo S.P.D.

MAgna quondam Africae dignitas fuit, sive ingenia, sive literarum studia, sive ipsum Religionis tuendae institutum, spectentur. Nam complures tulit viros praestantissimos, quorum ingeniis ac studiis nihilo magis humana sapientia, quam diuina est instituta. D. Terentio, Carthaginensi, nihil olim, nihil nostra memoria, vel prudentius, in vita civili, vel elegantius, iudicatum est. Plato autem in Socraticis Apuleii, Madaurensis, sermonibus, reviviscere visus, tanto quidem superiorum saeculorum studio, ut, eruditis in partes distractis, Apuleiani existerent, qui cum Ciceronianis de principatu eloquentiae, contendere auderent. At e christiana Disciplina, quanti in Africa viri prodierunt. E potioribus, satis est, referri, Tertulianum, Cyprianum, Arnobium, Optatum Milevitanum, Augustinum, quorum sanctitas animi cum omnis generis scientia certat. Quanta denique fide, atque [20] Constantia pro sacrorum integritate propagaverint Afri Doctores, horum monimenta, acta, Martyria, Concilia, loquuntur. Ecclesiae enim Africanae iniuriam faciunt, qui eam semper consensisse, tradunt. Etsi vero magnis Arabum viribus in Africam, effusis, magna rerum commutatio facta est, multum tamen abfuit, ut eorum Dominatu, omne vel ingeniorum, vel literarum, lumen extingueretur. Huius enim gentis, ad quam literae commigrasse videbantur, instituto, liberalis scientia colebatur, et, Mauris ex Africa in Hispaniam transgressis, veteres scriptores, simul apportati, literarum cultui, e tenebris erui caepto, multum adiumenti attulerunt. Sic habuerunt literae, quod tam antiquioris aevi, Africae acceptum referrent. Nostra quidem memoria haec terrarum pars aliarum rerum, quam studiorum, feracior narratur, eam tamen ingeniorum haud effoetam esse, vel hic suoaa doceat exemplo, sapientiae ac liberalium artium Magister clarissimus. aa The original printing: sua. 59 S.P.D. = salutem plurimam dicit; same formula at the beginning of the Löscher’s address to Amo. This was a standard formula, but “greetings” is a bit too weak: they wish the reader much health, or more generally welfare (salus can be health but can also be anything up to and including eternal salvation). 60 Kraus is here rejecting what was apparently either a standard accusation against the African church, or a standard piece of faint praise, eam semper consensisse, but we are not sure who said

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  191 To the benevolent reader, the Rector and Council of the University of Wittenberg extend many greetings59 Africa in the past had great honor, whether with regard to its [fertility in human] natural aptitude, devotion to letters, or religious teaching. For it brought forth a great many very eminent men, by whose natural aptitude and devotion divine as much as human wisdom has been taught. Nothing either in former times or in our own memory has been judged more sage in matters of social life, nor more refined in manners, than [the sayings of] Terence of Carthage. Plato himself seems to have lived again in the Socratic discourses of Apuleius of Madaura, in centuries past so well regarded that the learned were divided into factions, and there were Apuleians, who dared to contend with the Ciceronians for primacy in eloquence. And in Christian teaching, how many men came forth in Africa! It is enough to mention the greatest of them, Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius, Optatus of Milevis, Augustine, in [all of] whom sanctity of mind vies with learning of every kind. Their memorials, records, martyrdoms, councils, all proclaim the fidelity and constancy with which the African doctors labored to preserve the integrity of the religion. For those who say that the African church had always compromised itself do it an injustice.60 And even though the great force of the Arabs, spread throughout Africa, brought great change, it is far from true that their dominion extinguished all the light either of natural aptitude or of letters. For in the teaching of this people, to whom letters seem to have been transferred, liberal learning was cultivated, and when the Moors crossed from Africa into Spain, the ancient writers whom they brought over with them gave much assistance to the cultivation of letters, which was then beginning to emerge from the darkness. Thus from such ancient times letters have owed a debt to Africa. In our own memory, indeed, this part of the earth61 has been reputed more fertile in other things than in learning, but that it is by no means depleted in natural aptitude let the most eminent Master of wisdom [i.e. of philosophy] and of the liberal arts, this or what they meant by it. Consentire, “agreeing,” does not sound wrong, but it can also mean to conspire with someone against someone else, so perhaps “seek opportunities for rebellion,” which might be said of African church movements such as the Donatists. Perhaps it could also mean going along with some oppressive power; in which case martyrdoms would be important evidence of the African church’s resistance and struggle to preserve the integrity of the faith. Following a suggestion of François Duchesneau, we are translating in accordance with the second alternative. We might also translate “was always in collusion,” which might be compatible with both interpretations.

61 “Part of the earth” is commonly used by early modern writers as equivalent to “continent.”

192  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations ANTONIVS GVILIELMVS AMO Gvinea-​Afer.

Natus in ultimo Africae, qua spectat in Orientem, recessu, perparvulus venit in Europam, sacris initiatus est Halis Juliis, tantaque serenissimorum principum, ac Ducum, Brunsvigo-​ Guelferbytanorum, AVGUSTI VILHELMI ac LVDOVI[22]CI RVDOLPHI, clementia Usus, ut, in sui educandi cura, nullum paternae caritatis munus desideraret. Probata ingenii docilitate, commeavit Halas Saxonicas, et, varia eruditus doctrina, ad nos adiit, continuatoque diligentiae Curriculo, adeo sibi Ordinem sapientum conciliavit, ut, cunctis patrum suffragiis, Philosophiae laurea ornaretur. Honorem, meritis ingenii partum, insigni Probitatis, industriae, eruditionis, quam publicis, privatisque exercitationibus declaravit, laude auxit. Sic se gerendo, apud optimum quemque ac doctissimum, multum gratiae iniit, inter aequales facile eluxit. Horum igitur studiis cultus atque excitatus, compluribus philosophiam domi tradidit, excussis tam veterum, quam novorum, placitis, optima quaeque selegit, selecta enucleate, ac dilucide interpretatus est. Ea vero res tantam ingenii, quantam docendi, facultatem demonstravit, nec ineptam se praebuit ad docendi munus quo, naturali quodam instinctu, trahitur, aliquando in Academia administrandum. Itaque, cum expectationem sustinuerit nostram, nihil causae fuit, quare eum publico, quod petiit, iudiciibb nostri testimonio defraudaremus. Nos vero de illo optima quaeque speramus, eumque Principali gratia, quam pie veneratur, quam omni sermone praedicat, dignum putamus. Qua quidem fortuna, ut diu frui possit, suaeque bb The original printing: iudicio. See the note to the translation. 62 Amo was in fact from West Africa, not from East Africa, imagined as the part of the continent furthest from Europe, which is how both Kraus and Löscher represent Amo’s homeland. Paulin Hountondji, “Un philosophe africain dans l’Allemagne du XVIIIe siècle:  Antoine-​Guillaume Amo,” Les Études philosophiques, 1970, pp. 25–​46 (English translation in Hountondji’s African Philosophy:  Myth and Reality, second edition, Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 111–​30) conjectures that Kraus is confusing Amo’s hometown of Axim, in modern-​day Ghana, with Axum in Ethiopia, a city already famous in antiquity. However, it is true enough that Ghana is on the side opposite Europe of the bulge of West Africa, even if Kraus has the compass-​points  wrong. 63 The point is not just that Amo’s literal father was not in Europe to help, but that the Duke took on the role of a father to him. Kraus may be implicitly comparing Amo to Abram Petrovich Gannibal, the godson of Peter the Great and a freed slave who, like perhaps Amo as well, was a West African often taken for an Ethiopian (see Hugh Barnes, Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg, London: Profile Books, 2005). It is strange that Kraus leaves out the first of Amo’s ducal patrons, Anton Ulrich, Amo’s godfather at his baptism and the source of his first name; this may be because Anton Ulrich subsequently converted to Catholicism.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  193 Anton Wilhelm AMO, from Guinea in Africa, attest by his example. He first saw the light of day in the furthest part of Africa, looking toward the East,62 and came to Europe as a small boy. He was baptized at Wolfenbüttel, and received so much kindness from the most serene princes-dukes of Braunschweig-​Wolfenbüttel, August Wilhelm and Ludwig Rudolph, as not to fall short, in his education, of the benefit of a father’s care.63 After having demonstrated his natural aptitude for learning, he was brought to Halle in Saxony, from whence, having been educated in diverse disciplines, he came to us, where by ceaseless diligence in his studies he so won over the whole order of the wise that by the votes of all the senators he was adorned with the laurel in Philosophy.64 This honour [i.e. the degree], born of the merits of his natural aptitude, of his outstanding integrity, industry, and the erudition which he displayed in both public and private exercises, he augmented with praise.65 Conducting himself in this way, he found favor among the best and most learned, and easily shone out from among his peers. Wherefore, cultivated and summoned by their studies,66 he taught philosophy at home to many, and having examined the views of the ancients as well as of the moderns, he selected the best among [these views], and plainly and lucidly interpreted those that he had selected. In so doing, he showed as much natural aptitude for learning as for teaching, nor did he show himself unsuited for exercising at some time the office of teaching in the University, toward which he is carried by a kind of natural impulse.67 Thus, since he has fulfilled our hopes, there was no reason why we should deprive him of the public testimony of our judgment which he has requested.68 64 There is much rhetorical language here:  “the wise” for the philosophical faculty, “patres” (“senators”) for the Dozenten, “laurel” for master’s degree (or doctorate, but see Chapter IV, note 1). 65 This may mean “cum laude.” 66 This phrase is unclear. “Horum studiis” could be read either with an objective genitive, “by the studies of these things,” or with a subjective genitive, “by the studies of these people.” But the obvious antecedent is “his peers,” the philosophy students at Wittenberg. If so, “cultus” would mean not “adorned by these studies” but “honored or sought out by these people’s studies,” and “excitatus” would mean that their studies were the occasion, since they asked for his help (perhaps to tutor them for exams), that led Amo to select and interpret the views of the ancients and moderns in order to teach the students at home in privata collegia (for which see the Introduction). 67 This seems to imply a distinction between the kind of teaching that Amo has done so far, perhaps private tutoring for exams, and the kind that he might subsequently be officially appointed to do as magister legens. 68 This rendering depends on taking “publico . . . testimonio” together, and emending the “publico . . . iudicio nostri testimonio” of the original printing to “publico . . . iudicii nostri testimonio.” If grammatically possible, it would be preferable to keep the printed text and to take “publico . . . iudicio” together: sometimes an author says that he is submitting something “publico

194  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations spei fructum consequatur amplissimum, pro salute optimi maximique Principis, LVDOVICI RVDOLPHI [22] pro incolumitate totius Domus Brunsuigo-​Guelferbytanae, tot tantisque in omnem Germaniam meritis inclutae, Deum comprecamur. Publice scriptum, et impresso Academiae sigillo, munitum IX. Calendas Junias MDCCXXXIII.

L·S·

  

JOHANNES GODOFREDVS KRAVS D. h. t. Acad. Rector.

iudicio.” On any construal it looks as if Amo has asked for this attestation from the rector, stamped with the seal of the university. Presumably there was one copy with an actual wax seal; in the printed publication, there is a circle with “L.S.” = “loco sigilli” (“in place of a seal”) inside it. The attestation would presumably have been intended mainly for the eyes of Ludwig Rudolph—​the university is reporting back to him on the success of his protégé, and assuring him that any financial or other support he has given to Amo has been well spent. (This is the kind of report that, these days, a university might send to a student’s scholarship foundation, in more routinized format.) When Kraus says, at the end of his text, that “in order that [Amo] may long continue to enjoy this fortune, and that most ample fruit may follow upon his hope, we pray to God for the health of the best and greatest Prince, LUDWIG RUDOLPH, and for the preservation of the whole House of Braunschweig-​Wolfenbüttel,” this seems to mean that Amo’s best prospects for his future career depend on the continued support of Ludwig Rudolph, and, in the worst case, of his heirs. Kraus’s and Löscher’s prayers, unfortunately, were not answered: Ludwig Rudolph died in 1735, and his branch of the ducal family was extinguished with him, and as far as we know the cousins who

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  195 We have the best of hopes for him, and we deem him worthy of the Princely Grace whom he piously venerates, and whom he praises with every word. In order that he may long continue to enjoy this fortune, and that most ample fruit may follow upon his hope, we pray to God for the health of the best and greatest Prince, LUDWIG RUDOLPH, and for the preservation of the whole House of Braunschweig-​Wolfenbüttel, famed in all of Germany for merits so many and so great. Written publicly and protected with the stamped seal of the University, May 24, 173369

IN PLACE OF A SEAL

  

Johann Gottfried Kraus, current Rector of the University

succeeded him did not maintain the connection with Amo, who moved back from Wittenberg to Halle, thus from Saxony to Prussia, in 1736. 69 There are three possibilities: (A) the date of 1733 here is a mistake for 1734, so that the sequence of events was: first the disputation, then Löscher’s text, then Kraus’s text, then the printing. (However, Johann Gottfried Kraus was rector in summer semester 1733 but not 1734; to make matters more complicated, Johann Gottlieb Kraus was rector in summer semester 1734.) (B) The rector’s letter is really from 1733, the date of April 1734 for the disputation on the cover-​page is a mistake for 1733, and that the sequence of events was: disputation, then Kraus’s letter, then Löscher’s letter a year later (which seems like a remarkable delay), and then the publication of the dissertation. (C) Kraus’s letter is from 1733 and testifies only to Amo’s master’s degree from 1730, and not to any further degree received in 1734: so that the disputation, Löscher’s letter, and the publication would have succeeded each other quickly in the spring of 1734, but they would have printed the text together with the rector’s official testimony, to an earlier stage of Amo’s studies, from the year before. In the Introduction we argue for (C).

196  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations [23] CLARISSIMO DISSERTATIONIS HVIVS AVCTORI S. P. D. PRAESES.

Africam & ejusdem longissime a nobis dissitam regionem Guineam, olim ora aurea, ob copiosissimum auri proventum ab Europaeis appellatam, quam Patriam a nobis, & in qua primum aspexisti lucem, Matrem non tantum multorum bonorum et Thesaurorum Naturae, verum etiam ingeniorum felicissimorum non immerito depraedicamus. Inter quae Tuum potissimum eminet, VIR Nobilissime atque clarissime, utpote qui istius felicitatem atque praestantiam, eruditionis ac doctrinae soliditatem et elegantiam,cc multis Speciminibus hactenus in nostra etiam Academia magno cum applausu omnibus bonis, et in praesenti Dissertatione egregie comprobasti. Reddo Tibi illam proprio marte eleganter et erudite elaboratam, integram adhuc et plane immutatam, ut vis ingenii Tui eo magis exinde elucescat. Quod reliquum est, ego Tibi de egregio hoc elegantioris eruditionis Tuae Specimine ex animo gratulor atque Fausta cuncta, prolixiori cordis affectu, quam verbis ap[24] precor, & Gratiae Divinae ac Celsissimi et Optimi Principis. LVDOVICI RVDOLPHI pro cujus salute ac incolumitate, Majestatem Divinam adorare nunquam defatigabor, Te Devotissime pariter ac hummillime commendo, Dabam Vitembergae in Saxonibus, Mense Aprilis, A. O. R. MDCCXXXIV.

    

cc The original printing: elegentiam.

On the Impassivity of the Human Mind  197 The President extends many greetings to the most eminent author of this dissertation We rightly praise Africa, and Guinea, its region furthest from us, which the Europeans have long called the Gold Coast in view of its most plentiful yield of gold—​this country, in which you first saw the light, [which is called] by us the mother not only of many goods and treasures of nature, but also of most fertile natural aptitudes.70 Among which [aptitudes] yours, most noble and eminent man, shines forth most brightly, you who have previously proved its fertility and excellence, and the solidity and elegance of your erudition and learning, in our University to all good men with many specimens to much applause, and who have outstandingly proved it again with the present dissertation. I return it to you complete and entirely unchanged, elegantly and learnedly composed by your own forces, so that the power of your natural aptitude will shine forth from it all the more.71 It remains for me to congratulate you with all my soul for this outstanding specimen of your yet more elegant learning; to pray for all auspicious things with an affection of the heart more elevated than these words; and to commend you most humbly and devotedly to the grace of God and of the best and most exalted prince LUDWIG RUDOLPH, for whose health and preservation I shall never tire of praying to the divine Majesty. Composed at Wittenberg in Saxony, April, the year of the redemption of the world 1734. 70 The main idea here is clear enough (Europeans in general value Guinea as a source of gold and other such commodities; we, having gotten to know Amo, value the country as a source of human natural aptitudes or talents). But the sentence is syntactically difficult. The difficulty arises at least in part because Löscher is essaying a syntactically complex sentence for rhetorical effect, but it is possible that he has lost control in the process, or that something is missing in the printed text. It is natural to read the final verb “depraedicamus,” “we praise” or “we describe,” as taking a double accusative: we praise this country as the mother not only of natural treasures but also of human aptitudes. But then the main clause before “quam Patriam” (the part before the hyphen in our translation) would lack a main verb, and also “a nobis” wouldn’t be picked up. Following an ingenious suggestion of François Duchesneau, we are instead construing “depraedicamus” with a single accusative, “we praise Africa/​Guinea,” and understanding the participle “appellatam” as applying to both contrasting clauses, “this country, called by Europeans the Gold Coast, but by us the mother also of human aptitudes.” We are not sure this is right—​the syntax and word order are difficult—​but it is the only solution we have seen that does not require either emending the text or supposing that Löscher has changed constructions in the middle. 71 Assuming that “proprio marte” means Amo’s impulse in composing it, rather than Löscher’s in returning it unchanged. Evidently Löscher as president had the right to make changes in a student’s dissertation, apparently after submission and defense but before publication. Indeed it seems that he would normally have done so, and here ostentatiously chooses not to. This is connected with his saluting Amo as the “author” of this dissertation, and not merely as its defender. These compliments are distinctly missing from Amo’s praise of Meiner at the end of the Distinct Idea.

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)  

 

Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations on Mind and Body. Stephen Menn and Justin E. H. Smith, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197501627.001.0001

200  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Q. D. B. V. Disputatio Philosophica continens IDEAM DISTINCTAM Eorum qvae competvnt vel menti vel corpori nostro vivo et organico qvam consentiente amplissimorvm philo-​ sophorvm ordine Praeside M. Antonio Gvilielmo Amo Gvinea-​Afro In Avditorio Philosophico die xxix. maii mdccxxxiv defendit ioannes theodosivs meiner rochliz-​misnic. philos. et i. v. cvltor

_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ vitembergae, literis vidvae KOBERSTEINIANAE.

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  201 May God turn it to good! A Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those things that Pertain Either to the Mind Or to our Living and Organic Body which With the approbation of the order of most distinguished philosophers With Master Anton Wilhelm Amo,1 from Guinea in Africa, presiding In the Philosophical Auditorium on 29 May 1734 is defended2 by Johannes Theodosius Meiner from Rochlitz in Meissen Student of Philosophy and of both Laws

_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​ Wittenberg: the widow Koberstein

202  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations

[3]‌CAP. I. Continens Praemittenda Praemonitum ad rubrum hujus disputationis. Per ideam distinctam eorum, quae competunt vel menti, vel corpori nostro vivo & organico intelligo; cognitionem eorum, quae in actionibus humanis, per se, & semper, vel soli menti, vel soli corpori nostro vivo & organico, competunt. Nota. Quidquid in sola cogitandi facultate positum est, illud menti; quidquid solius facultatis sentiendi, immediateque in sensibus est, illud corpori competit. vid. Dn. Des Cartes sive Cartesius in Epist. Part. I.  Ep.  99. in examin. Program. in artic. 12. ibidemque in explicatione Programmatis n. 1. Ubi haec: Mens humana est, qua actiones cogitativae ab homine Primo peraguntur; eaque in sola cogitandi facultate, ac interno principio, consistit. Porro facultatem sentiendi soli corpori competere vid. ea quae prolixe deduximus in diss. nostra inaugural. de humanae mentis ἀπαθείαa cap. II. tot.

[4]‌Membrum I. Continens generalia. Praemonitum ad rubrum hujus membri. Per generalia hic intelligo; ea quae in praelimine quasi, methodi causa explicari debent; eum in finem ut rectius agenda ex ordine procedant. §.1. Ante omnia quaestiones hae occurrunt (1)  quid corpus nostrum. (2) quid mens humana (3) quid humanae mentis operatio in genere (4) haec quotuplex in genere, nempe (a)  quid actus intellectus (b)  quid voluntas (c) quid actus efficiendi seu effectivus?

a The original printing: απαθεια.

1 Amo is called “Master” here, when Löscher is called “Doctor” on the title page of the Impassivity. Löscher had a doctorate in medicine, whereas Amo does not seem to have had a doctorate in philosophy, and it does not seem that Wittenberg was offering a doctorate in philosophy, beyond the master’s degree, at this time. Amo got a master’s degree in philosophy from Wittenberg in 1730, but his disputation in 1734 seems to have been for a teaching position, not for a doctorate.

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  203

CHAPTER 1 CONTAINING PRELIMINARY MATTERS

Notice concerning the title of this disputation. By “a distinct idea of those things that pertain either to the mind or to our living and organic body,” I understand the discernment of those things which, in human actions, pertain per se and always, either to the mind alone, or to our living and organic body alone. Note. Whatever is placed in the faculty of thinking alone pertains to the mind; whatever is of the faculty of sensing alone, and is immediately in the senses, pertains to the body. See Descartes in his Letters, Part  1, Letter 99, Examination of the Program, article 12 and in the same letter in the Explanation of the Program, n.1. There it is written: “The human mind is that by which cogitative actions are primarily accomplished by man; and it consists only in the faculty and internal principle of thinking.”3 Further, that the faculty of sensing pertains only to the body, see what we have deduced at length in our inaugural dissertation, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind, in the whole of Chapter 2.

MEMBER 1 CONTAINING GENERAL POINTS Notice concerning the title of this member. By “general points” I understand here those things that for reasons of method should be explained at the outset, with the aim that the matters to be treated should proceed more correctly in order. §1 Before anything else, these questions arise: (1) what our body is, (2) what the human mind is, (3) what the operation of the human mind is in general, (4) how many types [of such operations] there are, namely (a) what an act of the intellect is, (b) what the will is, (c) what the act of effecting, or effective act, is.

2 As in the Impassivity, “defendit” could be either present or perfect tense, but is probably perfect, so that the dissertation would have been printed after the disputation. 3 See Impassivity, Chapter 2, “State of the Controversy,” Remark 1; as noted there, Letter I, 99 in the Amsterdam edition is the Notae in programma, Descartes’s critique of Henricus Regius (AT VIII-​2, 341–​69).

204  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations Nota. Quid mens humana, quidque corpus nostrum vivum & organicum, diximus in diss. nostra. de humanae mentis ἀπαθεία. quid mens dl. C. I. membr. I §.3. quid corpus ibid. in Nota 3. sequitur igitur in mox sequente §.2. I. Quid mentis operatio in genere. Per mentis operationem in genere intelligo; mentis actum cum conscientia (Bewust-​Werdung) & intentione, per ideas & sensiones cogitandi, & cogitata verificandi. NOTA. Quid intentio vid. dicta diss. de human. mentis ἀπαθεία C.I.m.1.§1. Nota II. Expositio I. Per verificationem intelligo; adhibitis mediis consequi finem quem intendimus.

Expositio II. Cogitatio est; quivis mentis actus per ideas & sensiones. [5]‌ §.3. II. Quotuplex mentis operatio in genere. Actus mentis respectu objecti circa quod, & finis quem intendit, triplex est. Nempe (1) actus mentis intelligendi seu intellectus (2) actus mentis volendi & nolendi (3) actus mentis efficiendi seu effectivus. Postremus effectus est priorum. NOTA I. Triplex hic mentis actus, tam numerice quam specifice est unus; & suas differentias relativas, saltem accipit ab objecto & fine. 4 Amo here, as in many other places, uses the abbreviation “d. l.” = dicto loco, “in the place that has been mentioned.” 5 This and similar Roman numerals in the Distinct Idea, which do not function as titles for sections of the dissertation, seem to serve as the equivalent of the numbered theses which Amo lists at the beginning of the Impassivity but not of the Distinct Idea. They mark a list of issues, and of controversial theses which Meiner undertakes to defend if they are challenged. See the Introduction for discussion. 6 In modern spelling “Bewusstwerdung”: an unusual but not an invented word. Amo uses “Bewust-​ Werdung” as the German equivalent of the Latin phrases “aliquid sibi conscium facere” or “aliquid sibi notum facere”; see discussion in our notes to the Impassivity. 7 See also Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Explanation 4. 8 “Verification” is not limited to checking the truth of a statement, but can include making something true, or fulfilling an intention. There are several ambiguities in this sentence, but they do not radically affect the meaning. “Attaining the end” is consequi finem, which could also be intransitive, “the end’s following” or “the end’s coming about,” but since Amo is describing an act of the mind, we have taken it as transitive. The verb intendimus could be either present, “we intend,” or perfect, “we have intended.” The phrase adhibitis mediis could be either an ablative of means, “by the means employed

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  205 Note. What the human mind is and what our living and organic body is, we stated in our dissertation, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind (what the mind is, ibid.,4 Chapter 1, Member 1, §3; what the body is, ibid., Note 3). Therefore, we will treat in the immediately following §2

I.5 What the operation of the mind is in general.

By operation of the mind in general I understand an act of the mind with consciousness (Bewust-​Werdung)6 and intention, of thinking through ideas and sensations, and of verifying the things that are thought. Note. On what intention is, see our above-​mentioned dissertation, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note 2.7 Explanation 1. By “verification” I understand attaining the end that we intend by the means employed.8 Explanation 2. Thinking is any act of the mind whatever through ideas and sensations. §3 II. How-​many-​fold are the operations of the mind in general The act of the mind, with respect to the object-​about-​which, and the end which it intends, is threefold. Namely, (1) the mind’s act of understanding, or intellect; (2) the mind’s act of willing and nilling; (3) the mind’s act of effecting, or effective act. This last act is an effect of the two prior acts. Note 1. This threefold act of the mind is numerically as well as specifically one, but it receives at least relative differences from its object and its end.9 [or attached],” or an ablative absolute, “the means having been employed.” In speaking of media here, Amo might mean what he calls a medium as opposed to an instrument, but he seems to be using the word generically to cover both cases. 9 This could, on the face of it, mean different things. A given act of, e.g., intellection can be numerically one? All of a given person’s acts of intellection are numerically one with each other? A given numerically single act can fall under all three types? All of a given person’s mental acts of all three types are numerically one with each other? There may be a sense in which all of a person’s mental acts are numerically one with each other, because they all belong to the same indivisible subject, that person’s mind. The mind cannot, like the body, have different accidents in different parts of it; nor can Amo say, as many philosophers could, that the mind has different qualities produced in it by different external agents (as he says in the Corollary at the end of this dissertation, what belongs to the mind and not to the body is unchanging); nor can he say, as Descartes does, that the intellect differs from the will in that the intellect is the mind’s passivity and the will is the mind’s activity (see the fourth Meditation, AT VII, 52–​62). The only ground of difference between the same person’s mental acts is relative, the difference in the objects they are directed toward.

206  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations PROBATIO I. Quidquid cogitamus est vel sensio vel res:  Sed utraque diversa est, ergo & mentis operatio, eo modo quo res & sensiones sua natura diversae, in eadem continentur. i.e. ratione objecti & finis cogitantis.

NOTA II. Objectum circa quod, est vel medium vel instrumentum, aliudque semper per illud intenditur. Finis est, quo adepto & praesente, mens a pristina sua operatione cessans, adquiescit, estque vel sensio vel idea, vel res. PROBATIO II. Non eodem modo mens versatur circa omnia. Mens enim aliter versatur circa intelligibilia, aliter circa appetibilia, aliter denique circa efficienda, & quidem haec omnia ratione habita objecti & finis.

Membrum II. Continens specialia de quovis actu mentis in specie.

[6]‌ SECTIO I. I. De intellectu seu actu mentis intelligendi. Praemonitum ad rubrum hujus sectionis. Communiter hunc actum intelligendi mentis, vocant intellectum; Sed non sine ambiguitate. Nam intellectus est vel mens ipsa, vel idea, vel mentis operatio. Pro mente ipsa quando dicunt:  Intellectus intelligit, ratiocinatur &c. ubi potius ita:  mens intelligit, ratiocinatur &c. vid. curs. philos. Aristo-​ Thomistic. Tom. 10 Amo’s meaning here is uncertain. Is it that sensations are of different types, things are also of different types, and therefore there are different types of mental operations having these different types of sensation or of thing as their objects? Or is it that sensations are different from things, and therefore each single mental operation has a complex intentional structure, being “about” a sensation in one way, and “about” a thing in another way? Amo seems to think that all of our mental acts are immediately about some sensation (or perhaps a sensory appetite, or perhaps an “idea” which is itself derived from a recollected sensations or sensations), but, so far as they involve an “intention,” are ultimately about something beyond that sensation, e.g., an external object which is the cause of that sensation, or an action which we undertake to accomplish (either assenting to, or resisting, the sensory appetite).

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  207 Proof 1. Whatever we think is either a sensation or a thing. But each of these is diverse, and therefore so is the mind’s operation, insofar as things and sensations which are of their nature diverse are contained in it, that is, on account of the thinker’s object and end.10 Note 2. The object-​about-​which is either the medium or the instrument, and something other is always intended by it. An end is that which, when it is acquired and present, the mind ceases from its former operation and comes to rest; and this is either a sensation or an idea, or a thing.11 Proof 2. The mind is not about all things in the same way.12 For the mind is about intelligible things in one way, about appetible things in another, and about things that are to be effected, finally, in another—​but13 all of them on account of the object and of the end.

MEMBER 2 CONTAINING SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING EACH ACT OF THE MIND SPECIFICALLY

Section 1 I. On the intellect, or the mind’s act of understanding Notice concerning the title of this section. The mind’s act of understanding is commonly called “intellect,” though not without ambiguity. For intellect is either the mind itself, or an idea, or an operation of the mind. (1)14 It stands for the mind itself when they say The intellect understands, reasons, etc., where they should rather speak thus, The mind understands, reasons, etc. See Cursus

11 See the Impassivity, Chapter 1, Member 1, §1, Note 3, for Amo’s definition of “end,” and §3, Note 2, for his distinction between “medium” and “instrument.” 12 “Is about” renders “versatur circa”; “versatur” was perhaps also the implicit verb with “objectum circa quod,” “object-​about-​which,” at the beginning of the present §3 and in Note 2. We might render the verb “versatur” more strongly—​“treats,” “handles,” “considers,” “deals with,” “is concerned with”—​but we wished to preserve the word “about” and the connection with the earlier uses. 13 “Et quidem” appears to be used here as equivalent to the German “und zwar.” 14 Inserting a “(1),” to be picked up by (2) and (3).

208  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations V. libr. I. Aristot. de anima C. III. anima non est corpus movens & motum D. Thomae Lect. 6.7.8. pag. m. 234. n.2. verbis: Si intellectus sit magnitudo, quonam pacto intelliget &c. ibid. n. 4. ita: ex eo quod motus intellectus sit intellectio &c. ubi potius pro intellectus, ponendum, mens. vc. Si mens sit magnitudo &c. motus mentis sit intellectio &c. aliàs enim hujusmodi locutiones sonant ac si dicamus, actio loquendi, loquitur, seu locutio loquitur &c. sumitur (2) Intellectus pro idea, & tunc intellectus & intellectio sunt synonyma: Nempe quaevis idea distincta. (3) Pro mentis operatione intellectus est; Illa mentis operatio, qua aliquid confuse vel distincte intelligit, (germanice der Verstand) & hunc intellectum actum mentis intelligendi nominamus.

§.1. Est nobis igitur intellectus in genere: actus ille mentis quo res sibi conscias facit. NOTA Quidquid mens sibi conscium facit, est vel res, vel sensio. Ratio. Nihil est in intellectu, quod non antea fuerit in sensibus. Philipp. Melanchth. Tr. de Anima. de Potentiae sentiente Q.I. quid potentia sentiens &c. id est: nihil est in [7]‌mentis actu intelligendi, quod non antea sensibus fuerit perceptum. Sed nihil percipitur quod non afficit sensus, omne adficens sensus est res sensibilis, nempe materia.

§.2. Actus hic mentis intellectivus est vel momentaneus vel reflexivus. 15 Augustinus à Virgine Maria (secular name Guillaume de Goazmoal), Aristoteles Reseratus [with alternative titles Cursus philosophicus Aristotelico-​Thomisticus or variants], vol. 6, Lyons: Boissat & Remeus, 1664. This volume includes translations of several Aristotelian works; Amo is using it as a reference for Aristotle. The phrase here cited is Augustinus à Virgine Maria’s header for De Anima I, 3, his p. 231 (it is not directly a quote from Aristotle). Amo’s references to Thomas are taken from the phrase that Augustinus prints immediately under this title. The point of the reference is simply that Thomas, who divides Aristotle’s text not into chapters but into (generally shorter) lectiones, cites what Augustinus (and we) call Chapter 3 as Lectiones 6–​8. The two following citations are indeed from p. 234 in this chapter; they are citations from Aristotle, not from Thomas. Amo has no citations from Thomas at any point. 16 Compare Hobbes’s rejection of sentences with an abstract subject and a concrete predicate, like “the understanding understands” or “the [sense of] sight sees,” which he says are no better than “the walk walks”: so De Corpore, Chapter 5, paragraph 3 (translated in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Molesworth, London: Bohn, 1839, vol. 1, p. 58). Hobbes in his Objections to Descartes’s

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  209 philosophicus Aristotelico-​Thomisticus, Volume VI, Aristotle De Anima, Book I, Chapter 3, the soul is not a body that moves and is moved, St. Thomas Lectiones 6-​7-​8,15 p.234 #2, in the words: “If the intellect is a magnitude, how does it understand, etc.,” and ibid. #4, “since the motion of the intellect is intellection, etc.,” where intellect should be replaced by mind, yielding “If the mind is a magnitude,” etc., “the motion of the mind is intellection,” etc., for otherwise such expressions sound as if we were to say “the action of speaking speaks,” or “the speech speaks,” etc.16 (2) “Intellect” stands for “idea,” and then “intellect” and “intellection” become synonymous, namely, any distinct idea. (3)  “Intellect” stands for “an operation of the mind,” that operation of the mind (in German, der Verstand) by which it understands something either confusedly or distinctly, and we call this kind of intellect the mind’s act of understanding.17 §1 Thus the intellect in general is for us that act of the mind by which it becomes conscious of things. Note. Whatever the mind becomes conscious of is either a thing or a sensation. Reason. “Nothing is in the intellect that was not previously in the senses”: Philipp Melanchthon, Tractatus de Anima, On the sensing power, Question 1: “what is the sensing power?.”18 That is: nothing is in the mind’s act of understanding that had not previously been perceived by the senses. But nothing is perceived that does not affect the senses, and everything that affects the senses is a sensible thing, namely matter. §2 This intellective act of the mind is either momentary or reflexive. Meditations, AT VII, 177, warns Descartes against falling back into the “Scholastic way of speaking” by saying that the intellect thinks, the will wills, and so on. 17 This whole Notice is reproduced in very similar form as Tractatus, General Part, Chapter V, Member I, §5, Note II, pp. 43–​44. 18 Philipp Melanchthon, Liber de anima, Wittenberg:  Lufft, 1562, p.  91. These are not strictly speaking page numbers but folio numbers: only the right-​hand pages are numbered. Amo’s quotation is not verbatim, Melanchthon having prius instead of antea, and sensu instead of sensibus, but these variations do not affect the meaning. (The same, or a very similar, formulation had already been cited by Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, Question 2, Article 3, argument 19: that is in an argument for the position that Thomas will reject, but in his reply to argument 19 he does not contest this premise.) Melanchthon cites the phrase again, in the same form, on his p. 123, in his discussion of the intellect, but there he calls it a “common saying” and expresses serious reservations about it; even on p. 91 he says that it may not be true in all cases, but is in most.

210  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations §.3. Actus mentis intellectivus momentaneus est; in quo mens humana non inquirit in rei consciae originem, existentiam, essentiam, & ea quae eo pertinent; sed ideas simpliciter adplicat, ad finem sibi conscium. Qui iterum est vel ante vel post Reflexionem, qualis ante reflexionem, mox diximus, ut v.c. repraesentatio, attentio, enumeratio seu recensio rerum &c. & in hoc non continentur ideae judiciosa ratione adquisitae. Post reflexionem vero, quando mens ideas judiciosa ratione adquisitas simpliciter adplicat, propter finem sibi conscium. vc. ut in definiendi actu, ubi mens ideas judiciosas componit &c. Item, in divisione, ratiocinatione, in syllogismis, demonstrationibus &c.

§.4. Actus mentis intelligendi reflexivus est; in quo mens realiter, & quantum potest, cum rectitudine & adaequate, inquirit in rei sibi consciae originem, existentiam, essentiam, & ea quae eo pertinent, eum infinem ut quantum fieri poterit, rem perfecte uti in se est, intelligat. [8]‌  §.5. Qui iterum est vel adaequatus vel minus adaequatus. Adaequatus, quando mens, omnia quae in re cognita sunt, distincte intelligit; Inadaequatus, quando non omnia & minus distincte. Uterque talis est respectu sensionum, rei cognoscendae, intentionis mentis cognoscentis.

SECTIO II. II. De Voluntate. PRAEMONITUM. Voluntas, quatenus est mentis volendi & nolendi facultas, cum instinctu naturali, confundenda non est, quod mox patebit. 19 We take “it” to refer back to the thing the mind is conscious of; the things that pertain to it would be its attributes or properties. The same issues arise in the parallel phrases in the next paragraph. 20 When Amo says that the mind inquires “really” (realiter), this seems to be connected with its inquiring into the “thing” (res) of which it is conscious. Perhaps the thought is: rather than taking our sensation or idea as a transparent window onto the external res, we critically examine the sensation or idea, investigate the cause of our having this sensation or idea, inquire whether this cause is the kind of thing that the sensation or idea itself represents, and if so also examine whether the attributes that the sensation or idea represents as belonging to the res belong to the res as it is in itself or only so far as

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  211 §3 An intellective act of the mind is momentary in which the mind does not inquire into the origin, existence, and essence of the thing it is conscious of, and into the things that pertain to it,19 but simply applies ideas to the end it is conscious of. This [sc. intellective act] in turn is either prior or posterior to reflection. We have just said what such an act prior to reflection is—​e.g., representation, attention, the enumeration or review of things, etc.—​and this does not include ideas that are acquired by judging reason. It is posterior to reflection, on the other hand, when the mind simply applies ideas that are acquired by judging reason, in view of an end that it is conscious of, for example in the act of defining, where the mind composes ideas of judgment [i.e. ideas that are acquired by judging reason], etc. The same is the case in division, ratiocination, syllogisms, demonstrations, etc. §4 An intellective act of the mind is reflexive in which the mind inquires really and, so far as it can, rightly and adequately, into the origin, existence, and essence of the thing it is conscious of, and into the things that pertain to it, in order to understand the thing, so far as can be done, perfectly as it is in itself.20 §5 This act in turn is adequate or less adequate. It is adequate when the mind distinctly understands everything that is in the cognized thing. It is inadequate when it does not understand everything, or understands them less distinctly.21 It is each of these [i.e. adequate or inadequate] with respect to the sensation, to the thing that is to be cognized, [or] to the intention of the cognizing mind.

Section 2 II. On the Will22 Notice. The will, to the extent that it is the mind’s faculty of willing and nilling, is not to be confused with natural instinct, as will presently be explained. it is related to our representation. This would be the kind of examination of our ideas that Descartes describes, notably in the third Meditation. 21 Amo literally says “it is inadequate when it does not understand everything, and [understands them] less distinctly.” But since the definition of adequacy is conjunctive, the definition of inadequacy should be disjunctive: a mental act can be inadequate either because it does not grasp everything that is in the cognized thing, or because it grasps them all, but indistinctly. 22 In the treatment of the concurrence of will with natural instinct in his 1738 Tractatus, Amo refers to this section of this dissertation. See Tractatus, Chapter I, §7, second Note, p. 5.

212  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations §.1. Voluntas est: actus mentis per ideas, propter finem consequendum, sed ratione habita convenientiae & discrepantiae instinctus naturalis, immediate concurrentis, cum praemeditato mentis Decreto. EXPOSITIO I.  Instinctus naturalis est:  Propensio ad praesentiam usumque ejus, quod gratum & bonum, & absentiam ejus quod ingratum & malum. vel cum Philipp. Melanchth. d.l. de sensib. interiorib. Q. quid potentia appetiva? est: facultas prosequens aut fugiens objecta.

NOTA. Naturaliter cum Brutis communes habemus sensiones, facultatem sentiendi & instinctum naturalem, de instinctu naturali Epictetus in Enchirid. c.38. ita:  illud enim natura insitum est omnium animantium generi ut ea quae nocitura videantur, eorumque causas, fugians & aversentur, contra, utilia & causas eorum persequantur & mirentur [9]‌&c. facultatem sentiendi & sensiones nobis & Brutis esse communes, probatur ex eo quod complura dentur animalia, quae vita & sensionibus carere non possunt, eo modo quo sunt animalia. vir. R. P. AUGUSTINUS A VIRGINE MARIA IN ARISTOTELE RESERATO Tom. V. libr. I. Arist. DE ANIMA. pag. m. 245. VERBIS: vivere namque videntur &c. EXPOSITIO II. Mentis Decretum est: operatio ejus, qua sibi aliquid statuit agendum vel ommittendum, propter sibi conscium finem.

NOTA. Ratione hujus mentis decreti, mens operatur vel δεσποτικῶςb vel πολιτικῶς. Sunt verba Philipp. Melanchth. qui ita habet d.l. de anima de

b The original printing: δεσποτικως. 23 Or “for an end which is to follow”: propter finem consequendum, with the usual issues of construal and translation. 24 There is an interpretive issue here: does Amo mean only that when we call something “will” we are considering its relations of agreement or disagreement with the natural instinct? Or does he mean that people count as exercising will only when they themselves compare what they are doing with their natural instincts, and decide to endorse or resist that instinct, rather than simply deciding to do X? It looks as if he means the latter: they can will something beyond, or even contrary to, the natural instinct, just as they can think something beyond the sensation, but they have to start by attending to the natural instinct or the sensation. 25 Melanchthon, De Anima, p. 103.

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  213 §1 Will is: an act of the mind by means of ideas, for attaining some end,23 but with regard to the agreement and disagreement of the immediately concurring natural instinct with the premeditated decision of the mind.24 Explanation 1. Natural instinct is: a propensity toward the presence and the use [or enjoyment] of what is pleasing and good, and toward the absence of what is displeasing and bad, or, with Philipp Melanchthon, ibid., On the inner senses, Question “what is the appetitive power,” it is “a faculty which pursues or avoids objects.”25 Note. By nature we have in common with the beasts sensations, the faculty of sensing, and natural instinct; on natural instinct see Epictetus, Encheiridion, c. 38: “It is indeed innate to the entire race of animated things to flee and avoid those things that appear to be harmful as well as their causes, and, by contrast, to pursue and to admire those things that are useful along with their causes, etc.”26 That the faculty of sensing and sensations are common to us and to the beasts is proven by the fact that there are many animals, which, insofar as they are animals, cannot lack life and sensation.27 See the reverend father Augustinus à Virgine Maria in his Aristoteles Reseratus, Volume VI, Aristotle, De Anima, Book I, p.245, in the words: “For they appear to live,” etc.28 Explanation 2.  A  decision of the Mind is:  the operation of the mind by which it sets up for itself something to do or to omit, in accordance with an end of which it is conscious. Note. By reason of this decree of the mind, “the mind operates either despotically or politically.” These are the words of Philipp Melanchthon, who has put 26 In Epicteti Enchiridion, et Cebetis Tabula, Graece et Latine, Prioribus editionibus emendatiora et auctiora, Rotterdam: Leers, 1654 (and many other printings with the same text and translation and pagination), this quote begins on the bottom of p. 85 and continues on the top of p. 87; these are right-​ hand Latin pages, the left-​hand pages being the Greek. In Schenkl’s Teubner edition of Epictetus (Epicteti dissertationes ab Arriano digestae, Leipzig: Teubner, 1916), this is no longer Chapter 38, but Enchiridion 31, 3, 1–​4. 27 The point is probably not that these animals cannot sleep and stay alive, but just that because they are animals they are definitionally sentient. 28 The quote here is from Aristoteles Reseratus, vol. 6, p.  245, in Augustinus à Virgine Maria’s Latin translation of De Anima I, 5: in the passage cited, Aristotle says that “plants appear to have life, although lacking in locomotion and sensation, and many animals appear not to have thought” (410b22–​24). The point is: plants have life but not sensation or reason; most animals have life and sensation but not reason; humans have all three.

214  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations sensib. interiorib. Ita in homine duplex est gubernatio altera δεσποτικὴ qua mens & voluntas cogunt locomotivam &c. & paucis interiectis pergit: Secunda gubernatio in homine est ea, quae nominatur πολιτικὴ, cum non tantum externa membra per locomotivam cohercentur, sed ipsum cor congruit cum recta ratione, honesta voluntate, motum persuasione, ut cum Filius Thesei Hippolytus abstinet a Noverca Phaedra. haec omnia bene se habent, ubi mens operatur imperando; Sed non raro etiam operatur indulgendo instinctui naturali, & inde actiones injustae & malae, ex illo vero actiones justae & bonae. i.e. Quando instinctui naturali imperat, in veritatis praecognitae exercitio. Secundum illud Gen. IV. sub te sit appetitus tuus, & tu domineris ejus. Indulgentis instinctui naturali est dicere: video meliora proboque, sed deteriora sequor.

[10] SECTIO III. III. De Actu mentis effectivo. Actus mentis effectivus est; quo mens aliquid, mediantibus corporis commercio & mediis adhibitis, finem consequi intendit. Varius est, (quemadmodum actus intelligendi & volendi) ratione objecti & finis.

NOTA. In actu intelligendi intelligimus vel substantiam vel proprietatem. Substantia altera est vel spiritus, altera materia. Proprietas altera est vel spiritualis vel materialis. In actu mentis volendi & nolendi respicitur vel ad simplicem sensionem, quae est vel grata vel ingrata vel ad conservationem & destructionem rerum & humani corporis, vel denique ad perfectionem & imperfectionem rerum & hominis. In actu efficiendi seu effectivo ad media, instrumenta eorumque applicationem. Ex actu intellectivo, res intellectuales; ex actu volendi & nolendi res morales, ex actu effectivo res politicae & artificiales. Hucusque praemittenda. 29 Melanchthon, De Anima, p. 110. Melanchthon is taking the contrast between reason’s “political” or “kingly” rule over desire and the soul’s “despotic” rule over the body from Aristotle Politics I, 5 1254b2–​6. 30 Genesis 4:7. “Shall” here is a hortatory subjunctive—​the Vulgate gives instead the future. 31 Medea in Ovid, Metamorphoses VII, 20–​21; the “but” (sed) is not part of the quote.

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  215 it, ibid., De Anima, On the inner senses, “Thus there is in man a twofold government: first, despotic, by which the mind and the will compel the locomotive power, etc.,” and a little further down he adds “the second government in man is that which is called political, where not only are the external members constrained by the locomotive power, but the heart itself agrees with right reason and a morally good [honesta] will, being moved by persuasion, as when Hippolytus, son of Theseus, abstains from his stepmother Phaedra.”29 All these things go well where the mind operates by commanding, but often indeed it operates by indulging, the natural instinct, and from the latter follow unjust and evil actions, while from the former follow just and good actions, i.e. when the mind commands the natural instinct in the exercise of a truth already known, according to this verse of Genesis 4, “your appetite shall be beneath you, and you shall dominate it”;30 it belongs to the person who indulges the natural instinct to say, “I see and approve the better things, but I pursue the worse.”31

Section 3 III. On the mind’s effective Act. The mind’s effective Act is that by which the mind, by means of its commerce with the body and of the means it employs, intends to attain something as an end.32 The act varies, as do the acts of understanding and of willing, on account of the object and of the end. Note. In the act of understanding we understand either a substance or a property. A substance is either spirit or matter. A property is either spiritual or material. In the mind’s act of willing or nilling we attend either to a simple sensation, which is either pleasing or displeasing, or to the conservation and destruction of things and of the human body, or, finally, to the perfection and imperfection of things and of man. In the act of effecting or effective act, we attend to the means, the instruments, and their application. From the intellective act [there arise] intellectual things; from the act of willing and nilling, moral things; from the effective act, political and artificial things.33 So much for the preliminaries. 32 Or “intends some end to follow.” Or “intends to attain some end,” but then aliquid would be an adjective modifying finem, in which case it should be aliquem. We are taking finem as in apposition to aliquid. “By means of X and Y” in this sentence is literally “with X and Y mediating,” using the participle medians; “means” the second time (the Y) is the usual word medium. 33 Intellectual things seem to be entia rationis:  intellection by itself does not produce new real things, but it produces quasi-​entities like the relations of subjection and predication, and

216  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations

CAP. II. Continens eorum quae dicta sunt applicationes.

Membrum I. Status controversiae. Thesis. Omnes res quae effectus sunt exercitii intentionis humanae mentis, eatenus menti tribuendae sunt, quatenus suam naturam habent ex conscientia (Bewust-​[11]werdung) & praemeditato mentis Decreto; sed quatenus effectus sunt sensionis, facultatis sentiendi, instinctusque naturalis, simpliciter in se considerati, corpori nostro vivo & organico competunt. NOTA. Haec dicuntur & defenduntur contra implicite dissentientes quos vid. diss. nostra. de humanae mentis ἀπαθείαc cap. II. p. 13. 14. Sed nominatim contra Joh. Cleric. in Pneumatolog. S. I. C. III. §.2. pag. m.14. ubi ita habet: Septem sunt praecipuae mentis facultates, quas sigillatim considerare operae pretium est (1)  intellectus (2)  voluntas (3)  sentiendi facultas (4)  libertas (5)  phantasia (6)  memoria (7)  habitus varii repetitis actionibus contracti.

Membrum II. Continens applicationes speciales. §.1. I. INTELLECTUS. Quid intellectus sit, diximus cap. I. membr. II. Sect. I. menti vero competit, quatenus ei insunt conscientia & mentis operatio per ideas, ex praemeditato Decreto; Sed corpori, eo modo quo ideae per c The original printing: ἀπαθεια. perhaps there can be analogous descriptions of the entities or quasi-​entities produced by the other types of mental act. If “artificial things” means artifacts, they are presumably real, but still with a status inferior to that of the natural things produced by God. The notion of moral and political things—​rights, duties, titles, legal persons and so on—​seems to come from Book I, Chapter 1 of Samuel Pufendorf ’s De jure naturae et gentium of 1672, a work which had great influence in Germany especially through Christian Thomasius, one of the leading figures at the

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  217

CHAPTER 2 CONTAINING APPLICATIONS OF WHAT HAS BEEN SAID MEMBER 1 STATE OF THE CONTROVERSY Thesis. All things that are effects of the exercise of an intention of the human mind are to be attributed to the mind to the extent that they have their nature from consciousness (Bewust-​Werdung) and from the mind’s premeditated decision; but in so far as they are effects of sensation, of the faculty of sensing and of the natural instinct considered simply in itself, they pertain to our living and organic body. Note. These things are claimed and defended against those who implicitly disagree. See our dissertation On the Impassivity of the Human Mind, Chapter 2, p.13-​14. But they are by name against Jean Le Clerc in his Pneumatologia, Section 1, Chapter 3, #2, p.14, where it is stated: “There are seven main faculties of the mind, which it is worthwhile to consider separately: (1) intellect, (2) will, (3) the faculty of sensing, (4) liberty, (5) imagination, (6) memory, (7) the various habits acquired by repeated actions.”34

MEMBER 2 CONTAINING SPECIAL APPLICATIONS §135 I. INTELLECT.36 What the intellect is, we have said in Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 1. But it [i.e. intellect] pertains to the mind in so far as it is conscious and operates by means of ideas from a premeditated decision. But it pertains University of Halle. Amo would have encountered Pufendorf ’s book, or others influenced by it, in studying law at Halle. 34 Amo’s reference to p. 14 is correct for our edition of reference, in Le Clerc’s Opera philosophica, vol. 2. 35 We insert this heading. 36 In the treatment of the faculty of sensing in the Tractatus, Amo makes reference to this paragraph of Member 2 of this dissertation, as well as to §3. See Tractatus, Special Part, Section I, Chapter I, Member II, §5, p. 59.

218  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations quas mens operatur, sensiones repraesentatae sunt, nam sensio & facultas sentiendi, corpori competunt per dissert. de human. ment. ἀπαθεία c.  II. m. unic. Thes. I. negativ. in exposit. cum. not. Item quidquid sub denominatione animalitatisd cum Brutis commune habemus, illud non menti sed corpori competit, Atqui sensiones & facultatem sentiendi, sub denominatione animalitatis cum Brutis communes habemuse &c. minor probatur eo, quod complura animalia quae mente & ratione ca-​[12]rent, non possunt non gaudere sentiendi facultate. vid. dl. cap. I. membr. II. Sect. II. exposit. I. in Nota. verbis: facultatem sentiendi &c.

NOTA. Denominationem animalitatis voco, quando homo consideratur Ut animal, & quoad corpus vivum & organicum. Secundum illud: homo est animal rationale. ubi τὸ animal quoad corpus vivum & Organicum, τὸ rationale, quoad mentem intelligentem. §.2. II. VOLUNTAS. Voluntas de mente praedicari potest, quoad Conscientiam & praemeditatum mentis Decretum, non quoad instinctum naturalem simpliciter talem, qualem diximus esse cap. I. membr. II. Sect. II. §. 1. Exposit. I. Nam aliàs etiam daretur voluntas in Brutis, quemadmodum instinctu hoc naturali gaudent. NOTA. Auctor laudatus, in definitione sua, voluntatis, idem per idem declarat. Declarat enim voluntatem per velle aut nolle (2)  per imperium voluntatis vid. d.l.§.6. ubi ita: voluntas est qua volumus aut nolumus aliquid contemplari mente, aut fieri a corpore, quatenus ab imperiis voluntatis pendet. §.3. III. FACULTAS SENTIENDI. Hanc totam de mente negamus, corporique damus vid. diss. nostr. de human. mentis ἀπαθεία tot. d The original printing: animalitatibis. e The original printing has “Atqui sensiones & facultatem sentiendi cum Brutis, sub denominatione animalitatis cum Brutis communes habemus,” which seems like one too many occurrences of “cum Brutis”: we have deleted one of them.

37 The reference is to an earlier section of the present dissertation.

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  219 to the body in so far as the ideas by which the mind operates are represented sensations, for sensation and the faculty of sensing pertain to the body, as stated in the dissertation On the Impassivity of the Human Mind, Chapter 2, Sole Member, Negative Thesis 1, Explanation with Note. Likewise whatever we have in common with Beasts under the denomination of animality pertains not to the mind but to the body; but we have sensations and the faculty of sensing in common with the beasts under the denomination of animality, etc. The minor is proved since it is impossible that the many animals lacking a mind and reason do not enjoy the faculty of sensing, see Chapter 1, Member 2, §1, Explanation, Note, with the words, “the faculty of sensing,” etc.37 Note. I say “the denomination of animality” when man is being considered as an animal, and with regard to the living and organic body, in accordance with the definition, “man is a rational animal,” where “animal” is with regard to the living and organic body, and “rational” with regard to the intelligent mind. §2 II. WILL. Will can be predicated of the mind, with regard to consciousness and the mind’s premeditated decision, not with regard to natural instinct simply as such, such as we described it in Chapter 1, Member 2, Section 2, §1, Explanation 1. For otherwise there would also be will in beasts, in so far as they enjoy this natural instinct. Note. The cited author, in his definition of “will,” explains the same thing by means of itself. For he explains (1) “will” by means of willing-​or-​nilling (2) by the command of the will,38 see [Le Clerc] ibid., #6, where it is stated: The will is that by which we will or nill something to be contemplated by the mind, or done by the body, in so far as it depends on the commands of the will.39 §3 III. THE FACULTY OF SENSING. We wholly deny this to the mind and attribute it to the body. See our whole dissertation On the Impassivity of the Human Mind. 38 We supply the “(1),” which is not in the printed text (see notes 44 and 85 for this kind of issue). “(1)” and “(2)” would mark the two uses of the noun “will” in order to show that Le Clerc is defining the same thing in terms of itself. 39 Johannis Clerici Pneumatologia, Section 1, Chapter 3, #6, p. 15.

220  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations §.4. IV. LIBERTAS. Hanc intelligimus vel de sola mente, vel de universo homine. Ratione mentis libertas est spontaneitas vel illa facultas, qua mens statuit aliquid agendum vel ommittendum, non aliunde im-​[13]pedita. Haec nunquam absolute talis est, quia mens non potest non mediante corporis commercio operari; eo modo quo operatur per sensiones. vid. DN. des Cartes seu Cartesius dl. Epist. part. II. Epist. V. n. 2. verbis: cur infantis &c. Ratione vero totius hominis libertas est: Absentia impedimenti, in operatione mentis per corpus. EXPOSITIO. Impedimentum est: quaevis res qua praesente, finis qui intenditur, consequi nequit. §.5. V. PHANTASIA. Est phantasia: Actus mentis intelligendi momentaneus, ante sufficientem reflexionem, in quo mens, pro indole instinctus naturalis, & affectuum qui praesentes sunt, sibi aliquid ut existens repraesentat, quod tamen revera absens est. Haec non simpliciter menti, sed saltem quoad operationem mentis repraesentativam, competit, quoad vero sensionem, facultatem sentiendi & instinctum naturalem, corpori nostro vivo & organico. §.6. VI. MEMORIA. Memoria est:  continuata idearum Praesentia, in cerebri dispositione, ex mentis operatione repetitiva, plusquam semel facta, oriundarum, & servatarum ad futurum finem. Haec quoad actum mentis repetitivum, cum conscientia & praemeditato decreto, menti, competit quoad vero cerebri dispositionem & immanentiam corpori.

40 Descartes, Epistolae. Part II, Letter 5, p. 16. This is from a letter of Arnauld to Descartes, AT V, 212–​18 (the Amsterdam edition, like Clerselier, prints it as an anonymous letter to Descartes). Arnauld, considering the question “why in an infant’s mind can there be no pure intellections, but only confused sensations?,” proposes the response, “As long as the mind is united to the body, it does not seem to be able to remove itself from the senses, which is necessary for pure intellection, since it is forcefully impelled by external or internal objects; which is why in sharp pain or intense bodily pleasure it cannot think except about the pain or pleasure; and it seems that it can be explained from this why phrenetics are captive in their mind, namely because when the spirits which are in the brain are forcefully shaken, the mind cannot attend to anything else.”

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  221 §4 IV. LIBERTY. This we understand either concerning the mind alone, or concerning the whole man. With respect to the mind liberty is spontaneity, or that faculty by which the mind sets up something to do or to omit if it is not otherwise impeded. This liberty is never absolutely such, because the mind cannot operate other than by means of its commerce with the body, inasmuch as it operates by means of sensations. See Descartes, Letters, Part II, Letter 5, #1, with the words, “why an infant’s” etc.40 But with respect to the whole man liberty is the absence of an impediment in the mind’s operation by means of the body. Explanation. An Impediment is: anything such that, when it is present, the end intended cannot be attained.41 §5 V. IMAGINATION. Imagination is: the mind’s momentary act of understanding, prior to sufficient reflection, in which the mind, according to the character of the natural instinct, and of the affects that are present, represents something to itself as existing which is however absent in reality. This pertains to the mind not simply, but just42 with regard to the mind’s representative operation; with regard to sensation, the faculty of sensing, and the natural instinct, it pertains to our living and organic body. §6 VI. MEMORY. Memory is: the continued presence, in the disposition of the brain, of ideas which arise from the mind’s repetitive operation carried out more than once, and are preserved toward a future end. This pertains to the mind with regard to the mind’s repetitive act, accompanied by consciousness and premeditated decision; but with regard to the disposition of the brain and immanence in it, it pertains to the body.43 41 Or “cannot follow,” if consequi is intransitive. 42 Saltem. We have sometimes translated as “only.” Strictly speaking, “saltem” should mean “at least.” But the Oxford Latin Dictionary describes a usage “passing from a wider to a narrower idea”; the sense would be “not simpliciter, but rather to the extent that . . . ,” or without any word for “saltem,” “not simpliciter, but to the extent that . . . .” But “not simpliciter, but just to the extent that . . .” seems a more idiomatic way of expressing the contrast. 43 In his treatment of memory in the Tractatus, Amo refers to this section of the present dissertation. See Tractatus, Special Part, Section I, Chapter V, Member I, §4, Note, p. 87. As he says there, “Memory inasmuch as it is a representative act [actus repraesentativus] belongs to the mind, but with regard to the immanence of ideas in the disposition of the brain it belongs to the body.” This suggests that “actum repetitivum” in the present paragraph might be a mistake for “actum repraesentativum.”

222  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations EXPOSITIO. Immanentia est: Perduratio alicujus rei in alio. [14] §.7. VII. HABITUS. Habitus est: Promptitudo agendi, acquisita per actiones plusquam simplici vice repetitas. quoad conscientiam, & decretam mentis operationem menti, quoad vero dispositionem subjecti, habitum recipientis, corpori, competit.

COROLLARIUM. Quidquid in homine immutabile est, illud menti, quidquid vero cum tempore mutabile est, illud corpori competit. TANTUM.

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  223 Explanation. Immanence is: one thing’s perduring in another. §7 HABIT. Habit is: the promptitude of acting, acquired by actions that have been repeated more than once. With regard to consciousness and the mind’s decided operation, it pertains to the mind; but with regard to the disposition of the subject which receives the habit, it pertains to the body.

COROLLARY Whatever is immutable in man pertains to the mind, but whatever is mutable with time pertains to the body.  END.

224  Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Philosophical Dissertations * [15] NOBILISSIMO SUO JOANNI THEODOSIO MEINER S.P. D.

PRAESES.

Continuatae, quae spectat humanam sapientiam, diligentiae, indefessis jugiter exercitationibus partam, & festinatis magni momenti incrementis, auctam, eruditionem, publica cum laude declarasti. Perge itaque feliciter, ut dudum fecisti, honestis moribus commendatus, & prudenter vivendo, literis operam navare. Sic [16] optimi quique te ament. Sic in Te habebit Parens, aetate, rerum Magistra, honorum meritò destinatorum, Titulis, pietateque longe venerandus, qui in alma tua Misnia, suggestum Sacrum in Decore exornat, Filium, non indignum tanto parente. Sic nobilissima tua gens, avito & suo meritorum splendore clara, in Te suas vigere & adhuc florere videbunt, virtutes. Ego Vero TIBI, VIR NOBILISSIME, potius ex optima animi propensione, quam verborum ambagibus gratulor.

    

Distinct Idea of what Pertains to Mind or Body  225 The President extends many greetings to his most noble Johannes Theodosius Meiner44

You have made known, with public honors, your erudition, born of unceasing tireless exercises of continued diligence in human wisdom, and growing by large steps in quick succession. Proceed happily, therefore, as you have done up to now, to pursue your learned work with zeal, favored by honorable morals and by prudent living. In this way may you be loved by the best of men. In this way your Father, who is much to be venerated, for his [advanced] age, which is the teacher of affairs [res], for the Titles of honor that he has merited, and for his piety, who in your home district of Meissen adorns with dignity a sacred pulpit,45 will have in You a Son who is not unworthy of such a father. In this way your most noble family, brilliant with the splendor of his and your grandfather’s merits, will see its virtues grow and continue to flourish in You.46 But it is more suitable for me to congratulate YOU, MOST NOBLE MAN, with the best inclination of the spirit than with roundabout words.

44 It was common for a praeses in a disputation to refer to the respondens as “his” (see Gertrud Schubart-​Fikentscher, Untersuchungen zur Autorschaft von Dissertationen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, [East] Berlin: Akademie-​Verlag, 1970, p. 42). This seems to mean that the respondens belongs to the praeses’s “team” of students or younger scholars, that the praeses has undertaken to train the respondens and now undertakes to protect him against attack, and that he is proud of the respondens’s accomplishments. 45 We are not sure how precise a description is intended. Amo seems to mean that Meiner’s father is himself a pastor, not simply that he has endowed a church or the like. Rochlitz is about 48 kilometers from Meissen, so “Meissen” may stand here, as in the description of Meiner on the title page, for the district rather than the town. 46 “Grandfather’s” could just mean the accumulated merits of earlier generations of the family, before Meiner’s father. We know nothing about Meiner’s grandfather, and nothing about Meiner’s father except what Amo tells us here.

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Index of Names Abraham, William E., 4n7, 18, 46–​47n129 Achenwall, Gottfried, 34 Amo, Anton Wilhelm, disputation on the right of Moors in Europe, 1, 10, 13, 23–​24, 26n70, 40–​ 41, 41n116, 68, 72, 73n174 On the Impassivity of the Human Mind [Impassivity], 2, 19, 27, 30, 44, 46–​ 47, 46n129, 57–​58–​59, 61, 66–​70, 70n169, 70n170, 73–​74, 74n175, 75, 77–​78, 78n180, 79–​80, 80n183, 81, 81n184, 82–​83, 85–​86, 86n190, 87, 87n192, 88–​89, 101–​02, 102n206, 103, 103n208, 104, 104n209 and n210, 106n212, 111, 115n219 and n220, 116, 128, 130–​31, 131n241, 132n243, 133n245, 134–​35, 138–​39, 148, 150–​51, 153–​97, 203, 204n5, 205, 207n11, 217, 219 Distinct Idea of those things that Pertain either to the Mind or to our Living and Organic Body [Distinct Idea], 2, 24, 27, 30, 41–​4 2, 58–​6 0, 67–​7 0, 70n170 andn171, 71–​7 2, 74, 74n175, 78–​8 2, 84, 86, 101, 103, 103n208, 111, 114n218, 115n220, 128–​2 9, 132–​3 3, 133n244, 135, 138, 141–​4 5, 145n255, 146, 148, 157n2 and n3, 160n10, 197n71, 199–​2 25 Treatise on the Art of Philosophizing Soberly and Accurately [Tractatus], 2, 10, 22, 22n59, 28, 30–​3 1, 65n164, 67n166, 69–​7 0, 72–​7 3, 76n179, 77, 78n181, 81n184, 85n188, 86n191, 101, 103n208, 114, 128, 131–​3 2, 133n244, 135–​3 7, 137n247, 138–​ 39, 141, 143n253, 150, 159n7,

160n9, 168n22, 171n26, 174n29, 182, 211n22, 217n36, 221n43 Anton Ulrich, Duke of Braunschweig-​ Lüneburg, 1, 6–​8, 14, 15n43, 18, 19–​ 20, 28, 55, 192n63 Aristotle, 52, 63, 64n163, 82, 85, 86n190, 89–​92, 98, 102n206, 103, 107, 109n214, 110, 120, 130–​31n240, 132, 181, 208n15, 209, 213, 214n29 Arnauld, Antoine, 137, 138n248, 220n40 August Wilhelm, Duke of Braunschweig-​ Lüneburg, 15n43, 16, 28, 193 Augustinus à Virgine Maria (Guillaume de Goazmoal), 208n15, 212–​13 Averroes, 119n225, 120 Bacon, Francis, 86n191 Berger, Johann Gottfried von, 59, 83, 166–​67,  184–​87 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 2, 30, 43 Bodel, Christian, 14–​15, 38 Brentjes, Burchard, 2, 10n27, 15n38 and n40, 16, 22, 26n70, 27n76, 38, 40n113, 41n116, 48–​49, 56, 71, 72n172, 76n177 and n178, 148, 150 Capitein, Jacobus Elisa Johannes, 4–​5, 9, 10n23,  12–​13 Chladenius (Chladni), Martin, 137n247 Clerselier, Claude, 106n212, 113n216, 138n248, 165n17, 166n18, 220n40 Democritus, 89–​90,  98–​99 Descartes, René, 45–​48, 50, 51n142, 60, 62n161, 84–​86, 88, 92–​93, 95, 102–​06, 111–​14, 116, 126, 126n236, 136, 138n248, 151, 152, 164n17, 165, 166, 166n18, 167, 178, 178n32, 179, 189n58, 202–​03, 205n9, 208–​09n16, 211n20, 220, 220n40, 221

236  Index of names Didier, Edme, 86, 175, 175n30, 183, 185n45, 185, 185n50, 188n57, 189 Dreyhaupt, Johann Christoph von, 39–​42,  72–​73 DuBois, W.E.B., 2, 44 Dutch West India Company, 4, 14, 38 Empedocles, 89, 98 Epictetus, 34–​35, 86n190, 147n257, 212–​13 Epicurus, Epicureans, 92–​93, 98–​100, 106, 108, 165n17 Erxleben, Dorothea (Dorothea Christiana Leporin),  55–​56 Fabricius, Johann Andreas, 33, 54 Firla, Monika, 5–​6, 13, 13n33, 15, 15n42, 20, 22, 33–​35 Francke, August Hermann, 33, 53–​56 Friedrich III of Brandenburg (King Friedrich I of Prussia), 52 Friedrich the Wise, Elector of Saxony, 52, 83, 186–​87, 187n53 Galen, 104, 170n24, 184n47 Gallandat, Henri-​David, 2, 14, 32, 42–​43 Gannibal, Abram Petrovich, 7, 19, 22, 192n 63 Grégoire, Henri, 2–​3, 43–​44 Gyekye, Kwame, 49 Hobbes, Thomas, 86, 208n16, Hoffmann, Friedrich, 29, 55, 57–​58, 60 Hountondji, Paulin, 16, 19, 49–​50,  192n62 Hume, David, 3, 44 John of Jandun, 118–​121 Jungius, Joachim, 61n160, 64n163, 66n165, 67n167, 85n189 Justinian, 10–​11, 24, 41–​42n66, 72 Kagame, Alexis, 50 Kant, Immanuel, 52, 60–​61, 66, 82, 88, 94, 144, 147 Kraus, Johann Gottfried, 19, 27, 74–​75, 75n176, 76–​77, 86n190, 187n52, 190n60, 192n62 and n63, 194–​95 Kraus, Johann Gottlieb, 75n176

Latino, Juan, 20–​22, 47n130 Le Clerc, Jean, 80, 84–​86, 101, 104, 111–​12, 114–​16, 142, 145–​47, 170–​71n26, 171, 180–​81, 189n58, 216–​17,  219 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 3, 25, 29, 32, 45, 51–​55, 57–​58, 60, 87, 93–​100, 106–​07, 112, 114, 127, 134, 138, 142, 164n16 Löscher, Martin Gotthelf, 59, 68–​69, 74, 75n176, 77, 83–​84, 86–​87, 155, 184n49, 187n52 and n55, 190n59, 192n62, 194n68, 195n69, 197n70 and n71, 202n1 Löscher, Valentin, 87n193 Lucretius, 92, 106, 165n212 Ludewig, Johann Peter von, 10–​13, 23–​26, 28–​29, 36, 40–​42,  72–​73 Ludovici, Carl Günther, 30 Ludovici, Gottfried, 41–​42, 72, 73n174 Ludwig Rudolph, Duke of Braunschweig-​ Lüneburg, 8, 15n45, 28, 77, 193, 194n68, 195 Luther, Martin, 25, 52–​53, 83–​84,  186–​89 Malebranche, Nicolas, 3, 87, 95, 199 Meiner, Johannes Theodosius, 2, 24, 27, 30, 67–​69, 71, 74n175, 157n3, 197n71, 200–​01, 204n5, 224–​25 Melanchthon, Philipp, 52–​53, 83–​84, 86, 128–​29, 144n254, 187n53, 208–​09, 212–​13,  214n29 Mohr, Anton Wilhelm, 15n39 andn43,  16–​18 Mohr, Rudolf August, 15–​17 Negri, Solomon, 40, 55 Nkrumah, Kwame, 2, 45–​48, 50 Peter the Great, 7, 19, 21, 192n63 Philippi, Johann Ernst, 2, 21–​22, 35–​39 Pufendorf, Samuel, 141–​42, 216n33 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 21–​22 Schardius, Friedrich Ludwig, 27, 30 Scotus, John Duns, 118, 120, 122–​25 Seneca, 86n190, 92, 106, 165n17

Index of names  237 Sennert, Daniel, 83, 85, 89, 91n95, 104, 111–​12, 116–​23, 127, 134, 151, 170n25, 171, 175, 179, 180n36, 181, 185, 189n58 Spener, Philipp Jakob, 53–​55 Spinoza, Benedict de, 86–​87 Stahl, Georg Ernst, 27, 29, 52, 54–​60, 85, 181n39 Stoics, 34, 91–​92, 106, 124n233, 147n257, 165 Sturm, Johann Christoph, 57, 87, 181–​82 Suárez, Francisco, 67n168, 94–​98, 108–​09, 161n214, 161n12

Tempels, Placide, 50 Thomas Aquinas, 64, 91n195, 96–​97, 117–​ 18, 121n229 Thomasius, Christian, 12–​13, 27, 53, 64, 216n33 Vater, Christian, 59, 83, 170–​71, 186–​87 Wolff, Christian, 25, 30, 36, 49, 54, 85n188 Wolff, Moses Abraham, 22–​23, 29–​30, 57 Zabarella, Jacopo, 117–​23, 127, 145n255 Zedler, Johann Heinrich, 40n113, 41–​42, 72, 73n174

Index of Places Africa, 2, 5, 6, 9–​15, 19–​20, 23, 25, 28, 32, 38–​39, 41, 43, 45, 48–​51, 190–​93, 196–​97 Axim, 2, 19, 25, 38, 42, 49, 192n62 Axum, 19, 192n62 Fort St. George, Elmina, 14 Fort St. Sebastian, Shama, 43n118 Ghana, 2, 11, 19, 23n61, 25, 27–​29, 38, 41, 45–​46, 49, 155–​56, 192n62,  193–​94 Gold Coast, (see Ghana) Guinea, (see Ghana) Halle, 1, 11–​1 3, 18–​1 9, 21–​3 0, 39–​4 2, 45, 48, 51–​5 9, 62, 64–​6 5, 68–​6 9, 71–​7 3, 85, 87, 137n247,  192–​9 3 Holland, (see Netherlands)

Jena, 2, 31–​36, 45, 54, 71 Netherlands, 4–​5, 9–​10, 14–​15, 38–​39, 57, 84n188 Prussia, 10, 24, 43, 52–​53, 195n68 Rochlitz, 14, 157n3, 201–​02, 225n45 St. Petersburg, 8, 27–​28, 53 Saxony, 14, 26, 28, 52, 75, 83, 187, 192–​93, 195n68,  196–​97 Suriname, 14, 42 Wittenberg, 2, 19, 25–​28, 30, 41–​42, 51–​ 53, 59–​60, 68, 71–​77, 84, 86–​88, 148, 186–​87, 190–​91, 193n66, 195n68, 196–​97,  202n1 Wolfenbüttel, 1, 6–​9, 14–​20, 23, 31, 33, 51, 55,  192–​93

Index of Subjects aboutness, 124–​27, 136–​37, 143 Africans, 1–​8, 11–​20, 22, 26, 32, 34–​35, 42, 43n119, 44–​45, 48–​51, 60, 72, 190–​91 agent intellect, 120, 129, 136 agent sense, sensus agens, 119–​21, 134, 136 Akan peoples, 4, 50–​51 artifacts, artificial beings, 127, 141, 216n33 attention, attending to, 121–​22, 124, 135–​ 36, 145n255, 160–​61n10, 210–​11, 214–​15,  220n40 blood, 92, 102, 104, 185n50, 187, 188n57 causes, 57, 89, 93–​100, 102, 109–​10, 112–​16, 118–​19, 121–​27, 129–​30, 134–​40, 142–​47, 160–​63, 168–​69, 205–​06,  212–​13 commerce, commercium, 47, 94–​ 95, 98, 128, 133, 138, 166–​69, 214–​15,  220–​21 communication, 96, 104, 106, 108–​11, 127, 129n238, 136, 138–​39, 160–​65 consciousness, 50, 80, 103, 105, 128, 130–​ 34, 137, 142–​46, 158–​161, 168–​69, 204–​05, 208–​13,  216–​23 continent, part of the world, 6, 11, 20, 191n61, 192n62 defender (of a dissertation or disputation), 24, 197n71, see also under respondens disputations and dissertations, pro gradu, 24–​25, 62, 65, 66n165, 67, 73, 76 pro loco, 62, 65–​67, 76 pro cathedra, 62 doctor, doctorate, 35, 40, 61, 63, 76, 79, 190–​91,  202n1 eidôla, 90, 99, 101n205 effective act, 101, 114, 132–​38, 142, 144, 202–​05,  214–​15

end, finis, 105, 128, 131–​35, 138, 143, 158–​ 61, 168–​71, 204–​07,  210–​15 ens rationis, 132, 138–​39, 141, 215n33 Ethiopians, 19–​20, 23, 55, 192n62 God, 34, 47, 77, 87n192, 91–​92, 95–​97, 100, 102n206, 103–​04, 114n218, 126–​28, 136–​41, 147, 164–​69, 194–​97,  216n33 habit, 80, 100, 142, 145–​46, 206–​07, 216–​17,  222–​23 idea, 45–​4 7, 70n170, 81–​8 2, 92–​9 3, 100, 103–​0 4, 113, 126–​2 7, 133, 135–​3 6, 142–​4 6, 156–​5 9, 162–​ 67, 172–​7 3, 176–​7 7, 182–​8 3, 202–​1 3,  216–​2 1 imagination, phantasia, 80, 142, 183n45, 187, 217–​18, 220–​21 impassivity, ἀπάθεια, 79, 101, 156–​159,  174–​79 ingenium, natural aptitude, 69, 75, 190–​93,  196–​97 instrument, 46n129, 56, 110, 125, 128, 130–​31, 134, 138, 141–​44, 168–​69, 205n8, 206–​07,  214–​15 instrumental causes, 140–​41 intellect, 80, 101, 113, 120 intellection, 113, 116 intentions, 4, 80, 101, 119, 126–​28, 130–​ 35, 137, 139–​42, 144–​47, 158–​61, 166–​71, 204–​07, 210–​11,  216–​17 conative, 88, 101, 110, 114n218 cognitive/​cognoscitive, 88, 138 judging, judgment, 82, 103, 113, 115–​16, 122–​24, 127, 133n244, 134, 136, 143–​44, 151–​52, 172–​73, 179n35, 180–​81,  210–​11

240  Index of Subjects law, law faculty, 1–​2, 10–​13, 23–​24, 35–​36, 40–​42, 53, 62–​65, 68, 71–​73, 76n179, 82, 157n4, 217n33 law of nature, 138, 147 liberty, 80, 142, 145, 216–​17, 220–​21 magister, magister legens, 25, 27–​29, 34, 37, 40, 62–​64, 71, 73, 76, 193n67 Marxism, 45, 48 medicine, medical faculty, 25, 28–​30, 40, 55–​59, 62–​63, 66, 83–​86, 184–​85,  202n1 medium, means, 46n129, 90, 98–​100, 124–​ 25, 128, 130–​31, 134, 143, 168–​69, 206–​07, 207n11, 215n32 memory, 80, 142, 145–​46, 170–​71, 186–​87, 190–​91, 216–​17,  220–​21 momentary and reflexive operations, 135, 143, 146, 208–​11, 220–​21 Moors, 1, 6, 8–​11, 13, 16–​19, 21–​24, 29, 33, 37–​38, 40–​41, 68, 71, 72, 190–​93 moral and political beings, 141, 214–​16 nerves, 104, 116n221, 137, 184–​85 Nzema people, 4n6, 43 object, 134–​37, 204–​07,  214–​15 occasionalism, occasional causes, 3, 87–​ 88, 92–​95, 114, 137n248, 138, 140 organic body, 47, 57–​58, 60, 79–​80, 103–​ 04, 111, 115n219, 128, 142–​43 paragraph, 70n170, 78–​79, 145–​46, 148–​50,  180–​81 passion, affection, being acted on, 47–​48, 57, 88–​93, 98, 103, 105–​07, 109, 112–​13, 118n224, 121n229, 122–​23, 160–​65, 174–​75,  178–​81 penetration, pores, 89–​90, 98, 106–​08, 127, 136, 138–​39, 160–​65 physical influx, 87–​88, 92–​98, 100n205, 106–​07, 109, 114, 163n14 Pietism, 25, 33, 51–​56, 147n257

pineal gland, 4, 93, 126, 134, 136, 138 praeses (in a dissertation or disputation), 27, 41–​42, 65–​70, 72, 74, 81n184, 83, 86, 94n197, 184–​87, 196–​97, 224–​25 preestablished harmony, 3, 25, 87–​88, 92, 94–​95, 114, 138, 142 representation, 47, 82n185, 103n208, 124, 126, 135n246, 145n255, 165–​67,  210–​11 respondens (in a dissertation or disputation), 35, 66–​70, 72, 74, 79, 81–​82, 94n197, 225n44 sensation, 4, 47–​48, 51, 69, 79–​80, 88–​95, 101–​06, 111–​31, 133–​37, 139, 142–​ 45, 147n257, 156–​59, 162–​67, 172–​ 77, 180–​85, 188–​89,  204–​21 sensible species, 88, 91n195, 92, 94, 98–​100, 104, 108, 112, 116–​27, 129, 131–​32, 134–​36, 145n245, 164n16, 168–​69, 180–​81, 183n 45 slavery 3n2 and n3, 4–​5, 7–​10, 12–​14, 17, 20, 23, 39, 42, 48, 72, 192n63 spirit, immaterial substance, 79, 81, 88, 94, 95n199, 101, 102–​11, 113–​14, 128, 130–​32, 135, 137–​41, 145, 156–​73, 176–​77, 182–​83, 186–​87,  214–​15 spirit as a subtle body, animal spirits, 104, 137–​38, 140, 144–​45, 184–​85, 220n40 theology, theologians, theological faculty, 15, 18, 22, 52–​53, 55–​56, 62–​63, 82–​ 84, 87n192 and n193, 170–​71 touching, contact, 46n129, 47, 89–​92, 106–​07, 114, 131n240, 162–​63, 165n17, 180n37 verification, 133–​34,  204–​05 will, willing, nilling, 101, 132, 133n244, 134, 141, 144, 145, 204–​05, 210–​11, 214–​15,  218–​19