Anne Conway was an English philosopher whose work, in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists, was an influence on Gottfried Leibniz. Conway's thought is a deeply original form of rationalist philosophy, with hallmarks of gynocentric concerns and patterns that lead some to think of it as unique among seventeenth-century systems.
Biography
Anne Finch was born to Sir Heneage Finch and his second wife, Elizabeth. Her father died the week before her birth. She was the youngest child. Her early education was by tutors and included Latin, to which she later added Greek and Hebrew. Her half-brother, John Finch, who encouraged her interests in philosophy and theology, introduced Anne to the Cambridge PlatonistHenry More, who was one of John's tutors at Christ's College, Cambridge. This led to a lifelong correspondence and close friendship between them on the subject of René Descartes' philosophy, over the course of which Anne grew from More's informal pupil to his intellectual equal. More said of her that he had "scarce ever met with any Person, Man or Woman, of better Natural parts than Lady Conway", and that "in the knowledge of things as well Natural and Divine, you have not onely out-gone all of your own Sex, but even of that other also." Conway grew up in the house now known as Kensington Palace, which her family owned at the time. In 1651, she married Edward Conway, later 1st Earl of Conway, and in the following year More dedicated his book Antidote against Atheism to her. In 1658, Anne gave birth to her only child, Heneage Edward Conway, who died of smallpox just two years later. Her husband was also interested in philosophy and had himself been tutored by More, but she went far beyond him in both the depth of her thought and the variety of her interests. She became interested in the Lurianic Kabbalah, and then in Quakerism, to which she converted in 1677. In England at that time the Quakers were generally disliked and feared, and suffered persecution and even imprisonment. Conway's decision to convert, to make her house a centre for Quaker activity, and to proselytise actively was thus particularly bold and courageous. Her life from the age of twelve was marked by the recurrence of severe migraines. These meant that she was often incapacitated by pain, and she spent much time under medical supervision and searching for a cure. She had medical advice from Dr. Thomas Willis. Conway was famously treated by many of the great physicians of her time, but none of the treatments had any effect. She died in 1679 at the age of forty-seven.
The text itself was probably written in 1677 and shows the influence of Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont. The text was first published in Latin translation by van Helmont in Amsterdam in 1690 as Principia philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae. An English edition appeared in 1692. The Principles develops Conway's monistic view of the world as created from one substance. Conway is critical of the Cartesian idea that bodies are constituted of dead matter, of Henry More's concept of the soul in his Antidote Against Atheism, and of dualist theories of the relationship between the body and spirit.
