Continuing our niche episode series on early modern responses to dualism by obscure thinkers... Anton Wilhelm Amo was an African philosopher (from what is now Ghana) in the early 18th century. He was brought to Germany as a child-slave for some dukes, who ended up treating him as a member of the family. He was allowed to cultivate his love of learning, and so he studied widely, including the fields of medicine, politics, and astronomy in addition to philosophy. Thus he was the first African not only to attend a European university, but to become a professor as well. 

We read his doctoral dissertation "On the Impassivity of the Human Mind," where he provides a potential improvement to the dualistic framework by incorporating some Aristotelian concepts into Cartesian thought, particularly through the notions of hylomorphism and different types of souls. He accepts the dualistic categories of mind and body, but holds that it is the body that senses things rather than the mind. Further, the body is not just a machine the way Descartes thought, but a living being, possessed of a sensitive soul (as Aristotle would put it). Thus life, or a capacity to sense, becomes a third category of being in addition to mind and matter.   

This episode is not for everybody, as it assumes some prior knowledge in the history of philosophy, and we don't spend a lot of time explaining it. This lets us engage with Amo's ideas more, rather than rehashing a bunch of old stuff to only spend a little time on them (and it's also a convenient excuse for our lack of clarity).