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)

Abstract

This section presents, in Latin and English, the entirety of Anton Wilhelm Amo’s 1734 Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to Our Living and Organic Body. In this work Amo attempts to work out the implications of the impossibility of being-acted-upon for the mind’s actions, and tries to show how the mind understands, wills, and effects things through the body by ‘intentions’ which direct motions in our body intentionally toward external things. Amo tries to show how far each type of human act belongs to the mind, how far to the body; he argues especially against Jean Le Clerc, who had attributed a broad range of acts to the mind.

Prejudice as Viciousness: Marie de Gournay and Anton Wilhelm Amo

“…So, too, would they remind us to approach our subjects with care and affective openness in the intentions with which we pursue them, and to avoid jumping to conclusions about what is or is not done. 15…”

“…Cases where an agent is ignorant may also be traced to a failure to care or value appropriately. In Distinct Idea , Amo observes that the mental acts we commit depend on the object and the end or, rather, the intention that guides the act (Amo 2020b, 215). Even if an agent targets an inappropriate object for their thinking—perhaps some phenotypic fact—the mental act may not go astray if it is guided by an appropriate end or intention; that is, wanting to know the right kind of thing; it is here that emotion can bridge an epistemic gap.…”

“…prejudice in general is a false and erroneous proposition which has its origin in negligence and ignorance,” it comes in two forms: those of the intellect and those of the will (Amo 1978, 190, 189). As an error, a prejudice of the intellect is when one understands or cognizes something incorrectly, while a prejudice of the will is desiring something morally inappropriate (189; 2020b, 215). Importantly, Amo is clear that negligence and especially ignorance are within the control of the agent (1978, 188, 189).…”

“…Similarly, Stephen J. Menn and Justin E. H. Smith point out that Amo was working at German universities and within an intellectual context influenced by Leibniz, Hoffmann, Stahl, and Wolff, among others (Menn and Smith 2020, 51–60). Moreover, Amo's metaphysical project in two of his works, Inaugural Dissertation on The Impassivity of the Human Mind (1734) and Philosophical Disputation Containing A Distinct Idea of Those Things That Pertain Either to the Mind or to Our Living and Organic Body (1734), is a sustained engagement with longstanding questions about the nature of minds, bodies, and Cartesian dualism (Amo 2020a, 2020b). Neither Gournay nor Amo were writing in ways unintelligible to us now: though Eileen O'Neill notes that Gournay's skeptical arguments can be somewhat difficult to recognize, she offers several models of how they might be reconstructed and interpreted, and Menn and Smith remind us that while Amo's genre of writing—dissertations, disputations—is foreign to us now, it was common in his context and in our interpretive traditions (O'Neill 2006; Menn and Smith 2020, 60–68).…”

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

“…This leaves three remaining texts: the Inaugural Dissertation on the Impassivity of the Human Mind, the Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to Our Living and Organic Body (both written in 1734), and a Treatise on the Art of Philosophising Soberly and Accurately. 3 All three, broadly speaking, flesh out Amo's account of the human mind and his theory of knowledge. 4 The Inaugural Dissertation and Philosophical Disputation share an aim, which is to identify and then solve a problem with Descartes' account of the mind-body relation.…”