Alumni and guests are invited to join the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Hamburg, for a talk by guest speaker, Dwight K. Lewis Jr - Anton Wilhelm Amo.

Speaker information

Dwight K. Lewis Jr., is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Univeristy of Central Florida and is currently writing a book on Amo. Brought to Europe as a slave in the early 1700s and then kept as a Kammermohr or "chamber moor" at a German royal household, Amo - quite astonishingly given his social status - went on to teach philosophy at the University of Wittenberg. Gaining a professorship, he produced an impressive body of work on issues as diverse as the legal status of non-Europeans in Europe and the Cartesian dissonance between the body and the mind, some of which Dwight has translated. Later, however, as the liberal attitude of the early Enlightenment faded and the European view of Africans became increasingly distorted by the slave trade, Amo was subject to racially-motivated defamation and felt compelled to leave Europe for Africa, where the final stages of his life are little documented. Dwight will offer us a biography of Amo and an overview of his philosophical works before taking questions.