Anton Wilhelm Amo 1703 – 1759

Anton Wilhelm Amo was a German philosopher of West African origin, born among the Akan people on what is now the coast of Ghana. Brought to the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel as a child, he received an extensive humanistic education and became the first known African to earn a doctorate from a European university. His Latin dissertations at Wittenberg and Halle defended a strict distinction between mind and body in which sensation is wholly attributed to the living body and the mind, by contrast, is properly characterized by pure thought. He later returned to Africa and is believed to have died there.