Anne Conway (Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway), the English philosopher, was born in London. Her education was primarily informal and self-directed. Her associates included Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Francis Mercury Van Helmont, William Harvey, and Robert Boyle, the latter two as physicians for her serious headaches. Later in life she scandalized More by becoming a Quaker.

Work and Influence

Conway's sole published work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, published posthumously in 1690, shows the influence of the Cambridge Platonists, Kabbalism, and Neoplatonism. It criticized Thomas Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza, and René Descartes, and influenced Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who, during the year he was introduced to her work by Van Helmont in 1696, adopted her term monad and used it in a quite similar way (Merchant 1979). A notable difference between their uses of the term is that, while Leibniz's monads are purely spiritual, Conway's...