Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Concept of Mind and Epistemology

“Anton Wilhelm Amo’s Concept of Mind and Epistemology”

This project aims to offer a comprehensive account of Amo’s concept of the human mind, metaphysics, and epistemology and the seamless interconnection among them. It also aims to draw the implications of this interconnection. Like his predecessors, including the Scholastics and Descartes, Anton Wilhelm Amo (c.1703-1758) conceives the mind to have significant conceptual affinity with theology. He claims plainly that the human mind is of spirits; a spirit is “any purely active and immaterial substance, always understanding in and by itself, and operating spontaneously from intention toward a determinate end of which it is conscious.” Consequently, Amo conceives the human mind a fortiori as a rational deliberative agent which attains intentional and deliberative ends of which it is conscious. Amo however strikes a distinction between the mind in general as spirit and the human mind. Is Amo positing two types of minds? I answer this question in the negative, arguing that Amo strikes a faint but very important distinction between how a univocal mind manifests and functions in two distinct worlds: the transcendental world and the perceptible world. The two-worlds does not imply two minds. It is rather how the mind as spirit manifests and functions in these two distinct worlds. Amo does not mention the two worlds; I propose that they are implied in his epistemological commitment and its connection with ideation and representation, on the one hand, and his metaphysical commitment in relation to complete grasp of reality, on the other hand. I then argue that for Amo, (1) the human mind is perspectivised as how the mind as spirit manifests and functions in the perceptible world. (2) With the human mind construed as that which can know only through representation and ideas, I argue that for Amo sensations and ideas are the special and proper objects of knowledge in the perceptible world, such that the peculiarity of the human mind as a thinking being, which understands through deas a which understands through ideas and sensations, plays an important role in his epistemology. I draw the rational and ethical implications of Amo's concepts of mind and epistemology.