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Here Becca Tarnas shares an essay and artwork from her blog, which houses a selection of Becca’s paintings, academic essays, poems, stories, and plays for the enjoyment and hopefully inspiration of others. Her writings explore diverse topics from philosophy, to ecology, imagination, mythology, archetypal cosmology, and religion. The following essay discusses the work of philosopher Anne Conway, a relatively unknown contemporary of the Cambridge Platonists.
The Infinite Dynamic Stairway: Exploring Anne Conway’s Philosophy
A WOMAN PHILOSOPHER
A sole treatise is all that the world has inherited of the philosophical thought of Lady Anne Finch, Viscountess of Conway, yet aspects of her unique system and cosmology can be traced in quiet echoes through the work of several of the great names that came after her, from Leibniz, Blake, and Goethe, to Bergson and Whitehead, to contemporary feminist and ecological thinkers. Her legacy is obscured, it seems, primarily by her gender, for she lived in a time when a university education was denied to women and her name was not even included on the title page of her only publication.[1] Except in rare cases, such as in the work of Leibniz, Anne Conway’s influence on subsequent thinkers can only be traced by a shadowy similarity of content, rather than directly by name. Yet she has been called “the profoundest and most learned of the female metaphysical writers of England”[2] by James Crossley, and “the most important woman philosopher in seventeenth century England” by Sarah Hutton.[3]
Becca Tarnas ’10 is an artist, writer, and doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program in San Francisco. She uses art and storytelling as a means to reconnect with our planet Earth in this critical time of ecological crisis. Becca was educated at the San Francisco Waldorf School for thirteen years before pursuing Environmental Studies and Theater Arts at Mount Holyoke, and she also holds a master’s degree from CIIS in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. She is currently working on an ongoing project entitled ”Women of Words,” in which she is reading the works of 35 female authors from Mary Wollstonecraft to Toni Morrison and writing engaging analyses that can be read.
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