Anne Conway

Anne Conway, born Anne Finch in 1631 and known after her marriage as Viscountess Conway, was an English philosopher who, largely self-taught and writing while suffering from severe chronic headaches, developed a distinctive rationalist metaphysics in correspondence and conversation with the Cambridge Platonist Henry More before her death in 1679. Her single surviving work, published posthumously in 1690 as The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, argues against the mechanist and dualist philosophy associated with Rene Descartes, holding instead that all created being is ultimately one single kind of substance, capable of change, perception and a form of life, so that matter is never simply the dead, passive stuff Cartesian mechanism took it to be. Conway's monistic vitalism, in which spirit and body differ only in degree rather than in kind, is understood by later scholars to have influenced Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who owned and annotated her book, and she is increasingly recognized as one of the significant philosophers of the seventeenth century despite publishing nothing under her own name during her lifetime.