- Lived:
- c. 1703–c. 1759 · born at Axim on the Gold Coast (today's Ghana); raised, educated, and celebrated — then mocked — in Germany; died back on the coast where he was born
- Tradition:
- German rationalism (the Leibniz–Wolff school) — practiced by the first African to earn a philosophy doctorate at a European university
- The Big Idea:
- Descartes got the mind–body split wrong in one crucial place: the mind does not feel anything. Sensation — pain, warmth, color, sound — belongs entirely to the living body; the mind's job is to know and to will.
- In their words:
- "Whatever feels, lives; whatever lives, is nourished; whatever lives and is nourished, grows... Therefore it is not the human mind that senses." (from his 1734 dissertation, our rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- A four-year-old taken from West Africa became a doctor of philosophy in the heart of the German Enlightenment, made a real contribution to the mind–body debate, defended the legal rights of Africans in Europe — and when the racist mockery came, sailed home.