Anne Conway
1631-1679 · Rationalism · Little-known
Conway was an English philosopher of the early modern period whose Principles argued that one living substance runs through all creation, spirit and matter alike. Angels, people and stones differ by degree, matter being spirit gone slow and thick, so any creature can rise or sink through the ranks and be changed into another kind. God stands outside that ladder, and nothing created can climb onto it. Leibniz read her book.
Signature
The position Conway is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain
- Good and Evil
- Good Real, Evil Privative
Positions on the 7 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- The Divine
- mildly between Describable and Indescribable (44 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Inherent (97 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Order
- leans Vertical (25 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- mildly between Immanence and Transcendence (59 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
13 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Conway refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Panentheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Harmony
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Good Real, Evil Privative
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Idealism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Pure Reason / Receptive Intellect
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Virtue
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Divine Providence
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Emanation
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Linear Progressive
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Death
- Reincarnation
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Path to the Divine
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Redeemably Corrupted
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- The Divine
What is your primary bond and loyalty?