african philosophy of mind. anton wilhelm amo amo’s philosophy of mind anton wilhelm amo...
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African Philosophy of Mind
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Anton Wilhelm Amo
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Amo’s Philosophy of Mind
• Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703-1759?), a native of Ghana, became the first black professor in Germany
• The Apatheia of the Human Mind: a critique of Descartes’s dualism
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Amo’s Philosophy of Mind
• Apatheia, from which we derive the word apathy, means nonreactiveness, passionlessness, imperturbability, or unresponsiveness
• The Stoics thought of apatheia as an ideal state in which the mind is free of emotions and passions
• But Amo uses it more broadly
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Mind as Passive
• Amo focuses on a distinction that underlies much Western thought about the mind
• Emotions are called passions because the mind is thought to be passive in receiving them
• Anger, love, desire, pleasure, pain are thought to be active in affecting the mind, which is passive in being affected by their causal power
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Sensation
• Sensation, traditionally, is thought to be similar to passion
• The mind passively receives sensory impressions from the world
• Notice the imagery: The world makes impressions on the mind much as a seal might make an impression on hot wax
• The mind is active, on this picture, only when it exercises reason
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Sensation
• Sensation, Amo argues, is essentially bodily
• It requires a complex physical interaction between a physical object and a perceiver’s body
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Sensation
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The Mind
• But how does interaction between object and body have any effect on the mind?
• Amo grants the Cartesian assumption that the mind is a spiritual substance
• But a spiritual substance, he insists, is purely active and immaterial
• It always gains understanding through itself (i.e., directly), and acts from self-motion and with intention in regard to an end and goal of which it is conscious to itself
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Amo’s Paradox
• The mind as spiritual substance is purely active
• Anything receiving sensations is in so doing purely passive
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Ideas
• For Descartes, the gap between sensation and reason is filled with ideas; indeed, Descartes’s contribution to early modern philosophy is often summarized as “the new way of ideas.”
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Two Roles
• But Descartes is assigning ideas two different and, in Amo’s eyes, incompatible roles
• There is a difference between Jones’s thinking ‘There’s a table’ and seeing the table
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Two Roles
• Amo argues that a spiritual substance could think, but not see, hear, or feel
• The actual sensing must be material
• The faculty of sensation is not mental but physical
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A Thing that Thinks—and Senses
• We are not essentially things that think, as Descartes declares, and only inessentially bodies
• We are essentially both
• A person is essentially a thinking being, but also essentially a sensing being, and therefore essentially embodied
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Mind and Brain
• The Akan language treats mind (adwene) as intellectual—a faculty of thinking rather than sensing or feeling.
• In Western thought, identity theorists hold that the mind and brain are identical.
• For the Akan, such an identification is impossible.
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Mind
• The mind is a “permanent possibility of thought,” which is not an object at all
• The mind consists of thoughts, but it is not simply a bundle of thoughts
• It is a certain kind of capacity, a capacity to have thoughts
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Basis of the Mind
• For the Akan, the brain is the basis of the mind
• It is by having a brain that I have the capacity for thought
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Mind and Person
• A person consists of body, life-force, and personality
• The mind is not a constituent of a person, for the simple reason that it is not a thing
• The mind is not a component of a person for the same reason that moving is not a part of a car
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Mind and Body
• This dissolves the mind/body problem
• Since the mind is not a thing, the question of how it can relate to a material thing, the body, does not arise
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Dualities
• Western philosophers often split the self into – mind and body, or – spirit and flesh, or – reason and desire
• The dual elements are complementary but also conflicting
• Reconciling and unifying them is the central human task
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Creativity
• The distinction between male and female provides a model for this kind of duality
• The union of male and female brings about creation
• So, too, is the union of dual elements a fundamentally creative process
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Creativity
• Human beings are thus essentially creative • Our central obligation is to create• We create things• We create a personality through our actions • Together we create a social order • In each case, we must reconcile and unite
conflicting elements, synthesizing them into an organic whole
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Freedom
• Our creative essence rests on our freedom
• The conflicting forces we must unite do not control or determine us
• We are self-determining; we are free to reconcile conflicting elements as we please, creating, in the process, our own distinctive personalities and lives
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Freedom
• Our creative essence also rests on our choosing among possibilities
• Possibilities, potentialities, are thus central to who we are
• Finally, our creative essence implies that we are also essentially agents
• We make choices and act, changing the world and ourselves as we do
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“A Thing that Acts”
• Descartes writes, “What am I? A thing that thinks.”
• For the Akan, it would be more accurate to say, “What am I? A thing that acts.”
• I am a thing that confronts and realizes possibilities, makes choices, reconciles conflicts, and creates things, including myself
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“A Thing that Acts”
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Personal Identity
• Philosophers of mind ask not only – “What am I?” and – “What makes me human?” but also – “What makes me me?”
• What makes me the person I am?
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Personal Identity
• Am I really the same person I was as a baby or a small child?
• Will I be the same person when I am old?
• If so, what explains that?
• What makes me the same person throughout the entire course of my life?
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Mind/Body/Identity
• These questions are closely related • If I am essentially mind or consciousness, I will tend
to look to mind or consciousness to explain my continuing identity
• If I am essentially a physical being, I will tend to look for physical explanations of my continuity
• Conversely, if I can explain my identity in certain terms, that will suggest that my essence can be understood in those same terms
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Divided Self
• The Yoruba, like many west African tribes, divide the self into three components: – the body, – the mind (or soul, or consciousness), and – the ori, the “inner head” or personality
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Thought Experiments
• If Jones’s brain (or mind) is transplanted into Smith’s body, is the resulting person Smith or Jones?
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Thought Experiments
• Jones?
• Smith?
• The Yoruba want to know how the resulting being acts
• Does it act like Jones or like Smith?
• The Yoruba see this as a question about ori. Does this person have Smith’s ori or Jones’s?
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Personality
• I am a being consisting of body and mind and personality
• What is essential to my identity is my ori, my personality
• That is what makes me me • Anything that radically changed my
personality would disrupt my identity, even if it did not disrupt body or consciousness