This paper contributes to a growing body of literature focusing on Anton Wilhelm Amo’s account of the mind-body relation. The first aim of this paper is to provide an overview of that literature, bringing together several interpretations of Amo’s account of the mind-body relation and providing a comprehensive overview of where the debate stands so far. Doing so reveals that commentary is split between those who take Amo to adopt a Leibnizian account of pre-established harmony between mind and body (Smith (...) 2015, Emma-Adamah 2015) and those who argue that Amo adopts a theory of occasional causation (Meyns 2019, Walsh 2019). Both views deny that the body is the efficient cause of the mind’s ideas but while the Leibnizian account holds that ideas exist innately in the mind, the occasional causation account maintains that the body is their occasional cause. That is, on this reading of Amo, sensations in the body are the ‘occasion’ on which the mind efficiently causes its own ideas. The second aim of this paper – which promises to take this interpretative debate in a new direction – is to demonstrate that we should in fact attribute to Amo a specific version of occasional causation known as 'concurrentism'. Concurrentism is the view that, while the mind does efficiently cause its own ideas, it can only do so with the assistance (or ‘concurrence’) of God. In other words, on this view, God makes possible the efficient causal activity of the human mind in generating ideas, in response to ‘occasions’ in the body. (shrink)

Marie de Gournay and Anton Wilhelm Amo, though thinking and writing in different social contexts, each offer an account of prejudice which bears a deep philosophical resonance to that of the other. This resonance is striking and mutually illuminating: Gournay and Amo develop a view of prejudice as a kind of epistemic and moral viciousness that damages both the prejudicial person and their socio-epistemic neighbors. Their accounts highlight how agents are rightly held responsible for prejudice, as it is the agents' (...) epistemic negligence and moral failure that allows prejudice to take hold. As such, their view offers a balance between a critical examination of individuals and an acknowledgement of the deep sociality that pervades the epistemic domain. (shrink)