Anne Conway

Anne Conway (born Finch, also known as Viscountess Conway) was an English philosopher of the seventeenth century, linked to the Cambridge Platonists. Her work is a strikingly original form of rationalism, now valued above all for its rejection of Cartesian dualism and for its distinctive use of the concept of the monad.

She was born in London in 1631, a week after her father, Heneage Finch, died, and grew up in the house now known as Kensington Palace. She received an unusually thorough education for a woman of her time, learning Latin and later Greek and Hebrew. Her half-brother John Finch encouraged her interest in philosophy and introduced her to Henry More, one of the Cambridge Platonists, with whom she kept up a friendship and a correspondence for the rest of her life. In 1651 she married Edward Conway, and the couple settled at Kensington. From about the age of twelve she suffered from severe migraines, which often left her incapacitated and led her to seek many medical treatments without lasting success. Her illness also shaped her thinking, as she turned to faith to make sense of pain and evil.

Her main work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, was probably written around 1677 and published posthumously. In it she argues that there is only one substance, that matter is not inert but has life and an inner capacity for change, and that the universe comes from God as an emanation. She distinguishes three levels of being: God, who is unchanging and supremely good; Christ, an intermediate level that changes only toward the good; and creatures, which all move toward the good through successive transformations. For her, evil is limited and temporary, while goodness is infinite.

Her ideas reached the wider world through Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, who gathered and published her writings, and through Leibniz, who knew them and built parts of his own system on them. For a long time her name stood in the background, but she is now recognised as one of the most original thinkers of the seventeenth century.