Abstract
Anne Conway (1631–1679) is best remembered as the author of a single book published posthumously, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Conway worked out a metaphysics to account for the relationship between matter and spirit and found models for her writing in the philosophical and theological disputes of the day. Her treatise owes a particular debt to Jewish Cabbalism and English Quakerism. Conway based her philosophy on a spiritual monism that has affinities with vitalism while running counter to the mechanistic theories that shaped seventeenth-century scientific thought. Her book offers an eclectic mix that combines a monistic theory of substance with Neoplatonist doctrines on the spirit of nature and sets forth a philosophy that remained in the shadows until its rediscovery in the twentieth century.
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References
Primary Literature
Conway, Anne. 1692. The principles of the most ancient and modern philosophy concerning God, Christ, and the creatures... translated out of the English into Latin. .. and now again made English (trans: J. C.) London.
Conway, Anne. 1996. The principles of the most ancient and modern philosophy (trans: Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
More, Henry. 1655. An antidote against Atheism: Or, an appeal to the natural faculties of the mind of man, whether there be not a God, 2nd ed. London: William Morden.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, and Sara Hutton, eds. 1992. The Conway letters: The correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their friends, 1642–1684. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Secondary Literature
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Snider, A. (2017). Conway, Anne. In: Sgarbi, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_476-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_476-1
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