Convergence and Divergence of Substances in Anton Wilheim Amo’s Philosophy

It may not be an easy task to comment or summarise the philosophical ideas, in a few pages, of Anton Wilhelm Amo, a highly cerebral and distinguished African philosopher, who unfortunately is scantily discussed both in Europe and Africa. Amo is hardly mentioned in European and Western texts, where he spent his entire professional career engaged in quality teaching, research and municipal services. In Africa, his native homeland, Amo scholarship is embarrassingly missing from the curricular of various universities in Africa. Truly Amo from ethnic Nzema extraction may not have been born, as it were, with a silver spoon, he nonetheless had a robust royal upbringing, having been brought up in the Royal Courts and Palaces of the Kings in Germany, who was earlier rooted out from his ancestral home of Axim in Ghana and transported to Europe as a juvenile. Amo’s rich educational background and a network of influences and exposure are noticeable in his works and treatise on metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, logic, language, etc. In this paper, an attempt is made to explicate Amo’s views on mind and body and that the priority of the mind to the body, including the sanctity of their distinctness is not accidental, but bound up with the Enlightenment ideal, which is the promotion of reason (rationality) with the human mind as its nursery bed. What is implicated here is the avalanche of philosophical juggling over the question of rationality in African traditional thought, which has become a burning issue, amongst contemporary African philosophers.