Anton Wilhelm Amo - Philosophical Career and Later Life

Philosophical Career and Later Life

He returned to lecture in philosophy at Halle (under his preferred name Antonius Guilelmus Amo Afer) and in 1736 was made a professor. From his lectures there he produced his second major work in 1738, Treatise on the Art of Philosophising Soberly and Accurately in which he developed an empiricist epistemology very close to but distinct from that of philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume. In it he also examined and criticised faults such as intellectual dishonesty, dogmatism, and prejudice.

In 1740 Amo took up a post in philosophy at the University of Jena, but while there he experienced a number of changes for the worse. The Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel had died in 1735, leaving him without his long-standing patron and protector. Unfortunately, that coincided with social changes in Germany, which was becoming intellectually and morally narrower and less liberal. Those who argued against the secularisation of education (and against the rights of Africans in Europe) were regaining their ascendancy over those (such as Christian Wolff) who campaigned for greater academic and social freedom.

Amo himself was subjected to an unpleasant campaign by some of his enemies, including a public lampoon staged at a theatre in Halle, and he finally decided to return to the land of his birth. He set sail on a Dutch West India Company ship to Ghana via Guinea, arriving in about 1747 where his father and a sister were still living, and his life from then on becomes more obscure. According to at least one report, he was taken to a Dutch fortress, Fort San Sebastian, in the 1750s, possibly to prevent him sowing dissent among his people. The exact date, place, and manner of his death are unknown, though he probably died in about 1759 at Fort Chama in Ghana.

Later, during the time of German idealism and romanticism, Amo's philosophical work was ignored by other Jena-based German intellectuals like Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Brentano, or the Schlegel brothers.