Anne Conway's Place: A Map of Leibniz
Steven Schroeder, Chicago,
Illinois
My philosophical views approach somewhat closely those of the
late Countess of Conway, and hold a middle position between
Plato and Democritus, because I hold that all things take place mechanically
as Democritus and Descartes contend against the views
of Henry More and his followers, and hold too, nevertheless, that
everything takes place according to a living principle and according
to final causes—all things are full of life and consciousness, contrary
to the views of the Atomists.
—Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, Philosophischen Schriften
Anne Conway is at the center of a philosophical map Leibniz sketched in
a 1697 letter to Thomas Burnett—midway between Democritus and Plato,
holding Descartes at arm's length with one hand, Henry More with the other.
Leibniz was a consummate mapmaker—not surprising for a philosopher
whose thought was, above all, relational. This article begins with
one of the many maps he drew, employing it as an aid in locating Conway,
a less wellknown seventeenth-century philosopher of internal relations.
In the past quarter century, Conway has been rescued from obscurity by reference
to her work in Carolyn Merchant's Death of Nature, by two recent
translations of her philosophical notebooks, and by a number of articles
that have examined her influence on Leibniz's monadology. The influence
itself is hardly a matter of dispute—as evidenced by Leibniz's own
acknowledgement. Its extent has been a subject of some controversy,
but it is not of particular concern here, and I will turn to it only briefly
in what follows. I return to Conway not because I think Leibniz borrowed
from her or because I think of her as a "proto-Leibniz" but because I think
her fragmentary work is an important development of Cambridge Platonism
and one foundation for a philosophy of internal relations that is not Hegelian.
My primary interest here is not Leibniz but his map, which I take as a finding
aid in picking up a thread of thought Conway wove out of a number of materials,
including, most notably, Platonism's Cambridge variety.
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