Anton Wilhelm Amo Lecture 2026: The Genesis of Doubt: From Anton Wilhelm Amo to Ghana’s Democracy; Invited speaker: Prof. Ato Quayson (Stanford University)

Abstract

This lecture will adopt the life and work of Anton Wilhelm Amo as the take-off point for reflecting on the genesis of doubt and its uses in society and politics.  It will be shown through and interpretation of various sources from philosophy and literature that doubt has many modes of articulation, partly in relation to established protocols of reasoning, but also with respect to aesthetic objects and to shared communal values.  It will be shown that in philosophy doubt is elevated to a cardinal methodological principle regarding the interrogation of premises, and that this interrogation forms the primary scaffolding for the construction of arguments in all branches of the discipline.  In literature, on the other hand, doubt is expressed in relation to affect and consciousness, the primary mode relating to the rejection of dominant norms of being in society. Examples for the argument will be drawn from Aristotle’s Poetics  and NIcomachean Ethics, the Book of Job, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, among various others.  Finally, a foray will be made on speculations about the role of doubt in political discourse in Ghana.

Professor Ato Quayson is a distinguished professor specialising in African American Studies and English Literature. He holds the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professorship in Interdisciplinary Studies and the Professorship of English and African and African American Studies. He is the chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. Before Stanford, he was Professor of African and Postcolonial Literature at New York University and Professor of English and inaugural Director or the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2016, the University of Toronto appointed him University Professor, the highest distinction the university can bestow. Professor Quayson currently occupies the prestigious Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies at the University of Ghana. 

The Anton Wilhelm Amo Lecture is organized annually by MIASA at the University of Ghana in collaboration with the Institute of African Studies and the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Ghana. It is named after the 18th century philosopher from present-day Ghana who taught at the universities of Halle and Jena. The lecture series promotes MIASA’s overarching commitment of making African thinking increasingly relevant in global academia, and it addresses questions of how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge production and epistemic justice.

This lecture is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/63760244908?pwd=vgSPgYiZD68jOLXzCZz7Yxo55AzHJ0.1

Meeting-ID: 637 6024 4908
Code: i51nWqruG