Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-x4r87 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T01:28:21.830Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

ANNE CONWAY'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2021

Elizabeth Burns
Get access

Abstract

Anne Conway (1631–79) produced only one short treatise – The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy – but addressed key problems in the philosophy of religion which are still much discussed today. The most significant of these are the problem of religious diversity and the problem of evil. Although the sources of her ideas may be found in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria and the work of the Cambridge Platonists and the Quaker George Keith, among others, she offers her own unorthodox solutions to these problems. The idea of Christ as an indwelling mediator of the divine who assists us in our moral endeavours is designed to appeal to those of all religions and none, while her claim that God created creatures knowing that they would eventually be redeemed, and that suffering promotes moral development which leads to redemption offers a novel response to the problem of evil. Conway's work is also important for its influence on the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and some have argued that it prefigures, at least in outline, the field theory of modern physics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 20 , Issue 59 , Autumn 2021 , pp. 143 - 155
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References and Further Reading

Aquinas, Thomas (1920) Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, First Part of the Second Part, Question 79, Article 2, <https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2079.htm#article2>..>Google Scholar
Broad, Jacqueline (2002) ‘Anne Conway’, in Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 65–89.Google Scholar
Conway, Anne (1992) The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, and Henry Moore, and their Friends, 1642–1684, ed. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope and revised by Hutton, Sarah (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Conway, Anne (1996) The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. Coudert, Allison P. and Corse, Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Conway, Anne and More, Henry (2020) ‘Anne Conway’, in Women Philosophers of Seventeenth Century England: Selected Correspondence, ed. Broad, Jacqueline (New York: Oxford), 80–113.Google Scholar
Coudert, Allison P. and Corse, Taylor (2002) ‘Introduction’ to Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), vii–xxxiii.Google Scholar
Duran, Jane (2006) ‘Anne Conway’, in Eight Women Philosophers: Theory, Politics and Feminism (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press), 49–76.Google Scholar
Hick, John (2006) The New Frontier of Religion and Science: Religious Experience, Neuroscience and the Transcendent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).10.1057/9780230626430CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutton, Sarah (2004) Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutton, Sarah (2020) ‘The Cambridge Platonists’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/cambridge-platonists/>..>Google Scholar
Hutton, Sarah (2021) ‘Lady Anne Conway’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/conway/>..>Google Scholar
Mercer, Christia (2012) ‘Knowledge and Suffering in Early Modern Philosophy: G. W. Leibniz and Anne Conway’, in Ebbersmeyer, Sabbrina (ed.) Emotional Minds: The Passions and the Limits of Enquiry in Early Modern Philosophy(Göttingen: de Gruyter), 179–206. <https://www.library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/31663>.Google Scholar
Project Vox, ‘Conway (1631–1679)’, <http://www.projectvox.org/conway-1631-1679/>..>Google Scholar
Rahner, Karl (1980) ‘Religious Inclusivism’, in Hick, John and Hebblethwaite, Brian (eds.) Christianity and Other Religions (Augsberg Fortress), reprinted in Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger (eds.) Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 606–13.Google Scholar