Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher

Description

This 2004 book was the first intellectual biography of one of the very first English women philosophers. At a time when very few women received more than basic education, Lady Anne Conway wrote an original treatise of philosophy, her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, which challenged the major philosophers of her day - Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. Sarah Hutton's study places Anne Conway in her historical and philosophical context, by reconstructing her social and intellectual milieu. She traces her intellectual development in relation to friends and associates such as Henry More, Sir John Finch, F. M. van Helmont, Robert Boyle and George Keith. And she documents Conway's debt to Cambridge Platonism and her interest in religion - an interest which extended beyond Christian orthodoxy to Quakerism, Judaism and Islam. Her book offers an insight into both the personal life of a very private woman, and the richness of seventeenth-century intellectual culture.

Sarah Hutton is Reader in Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Studies at the School of Arts, Middlesex University. Her publications include The Conway Letters: the Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More and their Friends, 1642-1684 (1992, a revised edition of a collection originally edited by Marjorie Nicolson in 1930), Ralph Cudworth: A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (Cambridge, 1996), Henry More (1614-1687): Tercentenary Studies (1990), and Platonism and the English Imagination (with Anna Baldwin, Cambridge, 1994).

"Hutton deals with both the biographical and the philosophical, placing both their historical context. Clearly written, with a good bibliography." CHOICE "[Anne Conway] was a sharp and perceptive thinker, and she occupies a node in the intellectual culture of the seventeenth century that, if given due attention, will reveal to us uite a bit about what was at stake in the great debates of the time, and what the range of possible positions was. Hutton shows this succinctly and well..her book constitutes in itself an argument for the importance of the so-called minor figures in early modern philosophy for anyone wishing to come to a profound understanding of the period." --Justin E.H. Smith, Concordia University: Philosophy in Review