Anton Wilhelm Amo

Nzema philosopher (c. 1703–c. 1759) from Axim on the Gold Coast (now Ghana), who studied and then taught philosophy at the German universities of Halle and Jena — one of the first Africans known to earn a doctorate in early-modern Europe.

Brought to Germany as a child in 1707 and raised in the household of the Dukes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Amo studied law and philosophy and rose to a professorship. His surviving works engage the philosophy of mind — notably the relationship between mind and body — in the rationalist idiom of his day. His reputation has been substantially recovered by modern scholarship.

Role in Fuller's orbit

Amo has no direct connection to Fuller; his presence in the Buckyverse People collection reflects the collection's breadth as a genealogy of thinkers on mind, perception, and knowledge — the philosophical questions that also animate Fuller's epistemology. No work currently in the corpus links to him; the connection is thematic rather than biographical.

See Also

• Alfred Korzybski (Alfred Korzybski) — another thinker on mind, language, and the limits of knowledge in the collection

Sources

• Anton Wilhelm Amo (source reference) — Zotero People collection (Wikipedia entry)