Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,
Welcome back for another instalment in our series on women philosophers throughout history. Today, we talk about yet another early modern thinker, Anne Conway. If you missed the previous articles in the series, here is the one on Elisabeth of Bohemia, muse and critic of Rene Descartes:
And here is the article on Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh:
You can find more articles on women philosophers on the main Daily Philosophy website.
Another thing, before we begin: With the publication of the last two videos in the series, my “Shortest Introduction to Western Ethics” is now complete. Here is the virtue ethics video, in case you’re interested:
Coming next on the channel is a video on the “unconscious violinist” argument in abortion ethics (next weekend), and I hope to keep them coming throughout the summer months.
On Tomorrow’s Teaching, my other newsletter for teachers and humanities instructors, we now have six articles, covering how to use Google’s NotebookLM to research new topics, how to use the Opera browser and its VPN, how to create exam questions and marking rubrics with ChatGPT, how to brainstorm new courses, and how to inspire one’s students to learn better, all using AI. Head over there if you are a teaching professional to learn how to use AI to improve your courses and lighten your own workload at the same time!
Upcoming on Tomorrow’s Teaching: How to use VideoScribe to create whiteboard explainer videos.
So, that’s enough advertisements for today. Let’s now step into our time machine and go back to the year 1631, when Anne Conway is just being born at what today is Kensington Palace, and where, almost 200 years later, Queen Victoria will begin her own journey through life.
Née Finch
Anne Finch (later Conway) was the daughter of Sir Heneage Finch, who had been a Speaker of the House of Commons under Charles I, but her father died just one week before her birth. She was the youngest of her siblings.
We can already see many similarities to the other women philosophers and scientists we talked about. Like Elisabeth of Bohemia and Katherine Jones, Conway was also born into a wealthy family, which was prepared to give her a classic education. She studied Latin and Greek, just like the other two women. She also studied Hebrew, which she could put to good use later, when she discovered her interest in the Kabbala, a system of Jewish mysticism. Her half-brother, John Finch, brought her together with the Platonist Henry More, who from then on became Anne’s private tutor and lifelong friend.
More significantly shaped her intellectual journey. He provided her with a rigorous grounding in philosophy, introducing her to the works of Descartes and other important figures of the era. Their letters show a dynamic exchange of ideas, with Anne not only absorbing More's teachings but also critically engaging with them. This mentorship was crucial in developing her own philosophical voice, and would it make easier for her to later challenge the ideas of Descartes and to develop her very own metaphysical system.
More later said of her, “in the knowledge of things as well Natural and Divine, you have not only out-gone all of your own Sex, but even of that other also.”
Henry More
Henry More (1614–1687) was an English philosopher, theologian, and one of the leading figures of the Cambridge Platonists, a group of thinkers associated with the University of Cambridge in the mid-17th century. The Cambridge Platonists sought to reconcile Christian theology with a version of Platonism and were known for their rational approach to religious and philosophical questions, advocating for a tolerant and inclusive approach to religion.
More tried to blend Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas with Christian thought. He believed in the preexistence of the soul and its immortality, emphasizing the soul's divine nature and its capacity to commune with God. We will see how this will later influence Conway’s thoughts on the relationship between God and human beings.
More was also a vocal critic of materialism and atheism, arguing against the reduction of all phenomena to mere matter and motion. He defended the existence of immaterial substances, such as the soul and God, and posited that the material world is pervaded by a divine spirit. Again, this was one of the central ideas that Anne Conway expressed in her own work.
More also wrote on ethics, virtues, mysticism, and the limits of reason. He believed in witchcraft and the power of mystical communion to reach true knowledge of God.
Finally, his conception of space as something empty and immutable influenced Isaac Newton when he was thinking about the laws of motion. Before that time, space was often only seen as a relative “distance” between things, but not as an entity in itself that could be measured and provide an unchanging three-dimensional framework within which physical events could be located and take place. This new conception of space would eventually take over physics and remain valid until the early 20th century and, finally, Einstein’s understanding of movement as something relative that takes place in four dimensions, rather than in a fixed, three-dimensional space.
But let’s get back to Anne Conway.
Anne Conway
In 1651, Anne Finch married Edward Conway. As opposed to Katherine Jones, who did not have much marital happiness with her Arthur, Anne Conway seems to have found a more suitable husband. He was also interested in philosophy, he was himself a student of More, and he dedicated one of his books to her. They had only one child, but it soon died of smallpox.
For much of her life, Anne shared her home with Elizabeth Foxcroft, whom she had met through More and the Cambridge Platonists. Foxcroft became Conway’s secretary and assistant, perhaps in a similar way as Katherine Jones worked and lived together with her brother Robert Boyle.
The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy
Anne Conway is somewhat special among the other women philosophers of this period, because she actually completed a work under her name (although it was published only after her death): The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.
In it, she presents her own philosophy in opposition to Descartes’ thought. Conway is a monist, just like Spinoza or Leibniz, and she tries to solve the problems of the Cartesian dualism, which Elisabeth of Bohemia had already pointed out. She developed a system that included “monads” as units of mind and matter, and this is said to have been an important influence on Leibniz when he created his own version of a “monadology.”
Conway does not think that the distinction between “mind” and dead “matter” makes sense. She writes: “The nature of every body is that of a life or spirit.” She is a monist, and she believes that “mind” and “matter” are just relative positions along a continuum of possible attributes of the one substance. Things can be more “mind-like” or more “body-like,” but nothing is entirely the one or the other thing. [2]
For her, as for Spinoza, this is necessary in order to solve the problems of the interaction of mind and body: if, as Descartes said, mind and body are entirely different substances, then how can they possible affect each other? How can the mind make the body move? And why does hitting someone on the head seem to make their mind fall into unconsciousness?
Conway believes that all creation, having been made by God, necessarily inherits some of God’s attributes. In the same way as the children of blond people will inherit the parents’ blondness, all things must inherit something of God’s spiritual nature. So there is no question that even material things have spiritual qualities. They only differ in the degree to which they have spirituality. God is a spiritual being, and so, according to Conway, no created thing can be an every way contrary to God. [2]
Interestingly, Conway already argues that “existence” is not a property, and that, therefore, the ontological argument for the existence of God, which has been put forth since Anselm of Canterbury, is invalid. This comes some hundred years before Kant famously made a similar argument.
She is also not shy to attack Descartes. Conway argues that Descartes is wrong in attributing “extension” only to bodies and “thinking” only to souls or mind-substance. Look, she says, minds also have a location where they are. When I move, my mind moves with me. It’s not like I’m in Hong Kong and my mind can be in Germany. It’s also not true that bodies can occupy one place in space so that other bodies cannot occupy that same place. Think of water and a sponge, for example. The water can occupy the same place as the sponge. Perhaps, then, souls are like that. They are just finer than bodies and can occupy the vacant spaces between the coarser materials that make up bodies. They don’t need to be immaterial to do that — in fact, they could not do that if they were immaterial.
In this way, Conway also solves the question of the interaction of matter and mind. Like wind pushing a sail, the mind, being a material thing, can naturally interact with the body.
Anne Conway’s book was originally published anonymously, as was the custom at that time with women’s books. This was not necessarily meant to diminish their contributions — the thought was rather that a high-standing woman should not be seen working, because this would diminish her social standing. And writing a book certainly was a kind of work, and therefore not a proper occupation for upper-class women.
Van Helmont, Leibniz, monads, and the Kabbalah
Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698), Conway’s friend who published her book after her death, was a Flemish alchemist, physician, and philosopher. He was deeply interested in and influenced by the Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mystical thought that we will have to talk about another time. He was also closely associated with Quakerism, particularly later in his life.
While van Helmont's early works were more aligned with alchemical and natural philosophical traditions, his later life was marked by a spiritual quest that led him to engage with various religious ideas, including those of the Kabbalah. Anne Conway was regularly exchanging letters both with More and with van Helmont, and she was also influenced by his ideas. In fact, she later invited van Helmont to live with her in her home from 1671 until her death in 1679 [1].
From the Kabbalah seems to come the idea that all things have life and perception, even those that we consider inanimate. In this sense, Conway is a panpsychist, and this idea later reached, through their common friend van Helmont, the philosopher Leibniz, who saw his monads in a similar way: as little souls that together comprise all things. JEH Smith writes:
In a letter to Thomas Burnett of 1697, Leibniz maintains that his own philosophical views “approach somewhat closely those of the late Countess of Conway,” in view of the fact that they “hold a middle position between Plato and Democritus, because I hold that all things take place mechanically as Democritus and Descartes contend against the views of Henry More and his followers, and hold too, nevertheless, that everything takes place according to a living principle and according to final causes — all things are full of life and consciousness, contrary to the views of the Atomists.” Leibniz does not explicitly address kabbalah in either of these passages. But could his invocation of the view that there is life and perception in all things itself be an implicit acknowledgement of a broad debt to dimensions of kabbalistic thought as propounded by Conway? [1]
The extent of the influence of Conway's work on Leibniz's thought is still a matter of scholarly debate. Some argue that there are significant similarities that suggest a strong influence, while others caution against overestimating this influence, given the lack of direct evidence of in-depth engagement by Leibniz with Conway's work.
In sum, while Conway and Leibniz were contemporaries and shared a common philosophical acquaintance, there is no evidence of a direct personal relationship or direct communication between them. Their intellectual connection is primarily through the transmission of ideas, with Conway's work potentially influencing Leibniz indirectly through the medium of Henry More and the broader intellectual networks of the time.
Conway wrote her book probably around 1677, two years before her death at the age of only 47. It would be another twelve years until Francis Mercury van Helmont would publish her book in Amsterdam in a Latin version. An English translation appeared soon after that but was then forgotten again until a modern edition appeared in the 1980s.
Today, Anne Conway has found her place right up there among the other greats of early modern philosophy: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, not just as a woman and friend of more powerful men, but with her very own system that is original and distinct from anyone else’s.
Notes
[1] Justin Erik Halldór Smith, Anne Conway and Monadology. Online here.
[2] Elliot Goodine, Anne Conway’s Metaphysics of Mind and Body. YouTube video, here.
This is fascinating. I had never before heard of Anne Conway but am glad that I do now. I'm also glad that at least some women, albeit usually rich, well-connected, and with sympathetic/indulgent husbands, were allowed to think, write, and communicate about matters outside the household. Your series helps fill a much needed gap in the history of philosophy.