Justin Smith

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.

This section presents, in Latin and English, the entirety of Anton Wilhelm Amo’s 1734 _Inaugural Dissertation on the Impassivity of the Human Mind,_ as well as letters commending Amo by his teacher Martin Löscher and by the rector of the university, Johann Kraus. In this work Amo argues that the mind cannot be acted on, that sensation is a being-acted-on by the sensed object, and therefore that sensation does not belong to the mind, and must belong instead to the body. Amo tries to expose and resolve self-contradictions in earlier philosophers, including Descartes and Sennert, on whether it is the mind or the body that senses.

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.

This essay argues that some of the reflections on the knowability of the past that have occurred within archeological theory in the past century or so may be usefully applied to the study of the history of philosophy. In particular, archeology shows us a way of reconstructing intentions from the sum of available of evidence, and it does not reject any evidence on the grounds that this evidence is fragmentary or defective. On the contrary, it sees itself as specializing in the study of defective traces of the past. In order to adopt this approach, however, historians of philosophy must rethink what sort of truths their field of inquiry aims to uncover, and how this aim distinguishes their work from non-historical, systematic philosophy.

"This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy. Many chapters articulate new, detailed methods of doing history of philosophy. These present conflicting visions of the history of philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline of professional philosophy. Several other chapters offer new approaches to integrating history into one's philosophy. These do so by re-telling the history of recent philosophy. A number of chapters explore the relationship between history of philosophy and history of science. Among the topics discussed and debated in the volume are : the status of the principle of charity ; the nature of reading texts ; the role of historiography within the history of philosophy ; the nature of establishing proper context."

In this short essay I will aim to show that literary fiction is consistently at the vanguard of the exploration of philosophical problems relating to the concept of world, while what we think of as philosophy, in the narrower sense, typically arrives late on the scene, picking up themes that have already been explored in literary texts that are explicitly intended as exercises of the imagination. I will pursue this argument with a sustained investigation of the shared aims and methods of Miguel de Cervantes and René Descartes.

This Introduction takes a broadly focused, global, and comparative view of the concept of embodiment, focusing particularly on some of the ways it has been interpreted outside of the history of European thought. It also provides a general overview of the central concerns and questions of the volume as a whole, such as: What is the historical and conceptual relationship between the idea of embodiment and the idea of subjecthood? Am I who I am principally in virtue of the fact that I have the body I have? Relatedly, what is the relationship of embodiment to being and to individuality? Is embodiment a necessary condition of being? Of being an individual? What are the theological dimensions of embodiment? To what extent has the concept of embodiment been deployed in the history of philosophy to contrast the created world with the state of existence enjoyed by God? What are the normative dimensions of theories of embodiment? To what extent is the problem of embodiment a distinctly western preoccupation?

By his own account, Leibniz first encountered the True Intellectual System of the Universe of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth during his visit to Rome in the spring of 1689, although the work itself had been published just over a decade earlier in 1678. Leibniz would later report to Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris Masham, that he had been delighted to see the wisdom of the ancients “accompanied by solid reflections”. He had certainly taken the book seriously, devoting sufficient attention to make copious critical notes to the first part. Some years later, towards the end of 1703 or early in 1704, Masham sent Leibniz a copy of her father’s True Intellectual System [TIS]. So began a two-year correspondence between Leibniz and Masham.

In this volume Smith examines the early modern science of generation, which included the study of animal conception, heredity, and fetal development. Analyzing how it influenced the contemporary treatment of traditional philosophical questions, it also demonstrates how philosophical pre-suppositions about mechanism, substance, and cause informed the interpretations offered by those conducting empirical research on animal reproduction. Composed of essays written by an international team of leading scholars, the book offers a fresh perspective on some of the basic problems in early modern philosophy. It also considers how these basic problems manifested themselves within an area of scientific inquiry that had not previously received much consideration by historians of philosophy.

I clarify Hegel’s role in the Europeanization of philosophy over the course of the 19th century. I begin with an investigation of the way non-Western philosophy was conceptualized in Europe before, and after, I move on to a consideration of the debates about philosophy that emerged in late 19th century China because of European attempts, such as that of Hegel, to circumscribe the geographical and civilizational scope of this discipline. How may we see the emergence of a distinctly modern, generally nationalist, discourse about “Chinese philosophy” within China as a reflection of larger global processes then taking place?