Pluralizing Philosophy’s Past.

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Reflections in the History of Philosophy
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Pluralizing
Philosophy’s Past
New Reflections in
the History of Philosophy

Edited by
Amber L. Griffioen · Marius Backmann
Pluralizing Philosophy’s Past
Amber L. Griffioen • Marius Backmann
Editors

Pluralizing
Philosophy’s Past
New Reflections in the History of Philosophy
Editors
Amber L. Griffioen Marius Backmann
Faculty of Arts and Humanities Department of Philosophy, Logic and
Duke Kunshan University Scientific Method
Kunshan, China London School of Economics and
Political Science
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-13404-3    ISBN 978-3-031-13405-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13405-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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 To Eileen O’Neill. Her brilliant scholarship, advocacy,
and generosity made all the difference to the kind of efforts
that this volume is meant to represent.
 Foreword

Eileen O’Neill was the first feminist historian of philosophy to combine a

scholar’s attentiveness to contextual and historical detail with a philoso-
pher’s concern for clarity and precision. Relying heavily on the historical
work and scholarly inventiveness of previous scholars and combining that
with her own philosophical acumen and contextualist tenacity, O’Neill
showed us a way to escape the standard categories that twentieth-century
philosophical historians had forced upon our discipline’s past. She moti-
vated a new generation of scholars to muster the courage to examine the
understudied people, topics, and methodologies in philosophy’s rich and
varied past.
The current volume is a testament to the newfound courage of histori-
ans of philosophy to rethink standard categories, ask new questions, and
find forgotten gems.
The arc of the history of philosophy that has been taught in US and
European universities for decades was constructed in the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries by a relatively small group of
figures and bears little resemblance to the complications and intellectual
richness of philosophy’s past.1 Until we do the hard work of exploring a
wider range of the philosophical proposals, debates, and conversations, we
will continue to misrepresent our discipline’s past and leave our students
with a distorted picture.

1
Christia Mercer (2020). Empowering Philosophy. Presidential Address of the American
Philosophical Association. Audio available at: https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/10/14/
empowering-philosophy/

vii
viii FOREWORD

The issue is not merely a concern for historical accuracy: the standard
approach to the history of philosophy is not only misleading—it has
ignored philosophically rich and provocative ideas. Once we look past the
triumphal-march approach of one great man following another, hone new
tools, and grapple with unfamiliar ideas, we will discover exciting new
topics, methods, and arguments that will not only enliven our discipline
but include voices that historically have been shut out. The importance of
volumes like this is that they help us use philosophy’s past to rethink the
topics and sources we research and teach. Capacious in historical range,
philosophical methodology, and cultural roots, the chapters collected here
will contribute to the growing awareness that philosophy’s past is richer
and more diverse than previously understood.

New York Christia Mercer

April 20, 2021
 About the Book

The idea for this book and many of the contributions found in it stems
from an international workshop organized by the editors in 2018 on
“Expanding the Canon: Transitions and Transformations in Medieval and
Early Modern Philosophy.” Held over the course of five days at Burg
Neuhaus in South Tyrol, the workshop included scholars and authors
from various backgrounds and countries at different stages in their careers.
Despite the logistical nightmare of getting participants from all over the
globe to the tiny Tyrolian town of Gais in Northern Italy, being able to
spend several days (and not a few late evenings) sequestered in a medieval
castle listening to a diverse group of scholars speak about historical topics
and figures not commonly treated in Anglo-American and European
departments was an absolute joy and made us all the more aware of the
need for such a volume as this one. The hindsight provided by over a year
of global pandemic also makes us recognize what an immense privilege it
was to be able to meet as we did.
Of course, no volume of this kind can cover all the neglected move-
ments, figures, and ideas that a “properly plural” history of philosophy
would contain. Our aspiration here is instead to give those interested in
expanding their own historical philosophical breadth a taste of the great
wealth of historical material and scholarship already out there by briefly
showcasing just some of the incredible research being done on a number
of different subjects in the history of ideas. We hope that this will be one
of many volumes aimed at pluralizing the history of philosophy in new and

ix
x About the Book

exciting ways and that it serves as an inspiration for our readers to step
outside the limits of their own philosophical experience.
We wish to express our gratitude to the German Research Foundation
(DFG), the International Office and Young Scholar Fund of the University
of Konstanz, as well as the “Gender in Teaching” initiative of the University
of Konstanz Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity, for their support
in funding the 2018 workshop. Further thanks are due to the Burgherr,
his family, and all the staff (and to the entertaining family of peacocks) at
Burg Neuhaus for all the delicious home-­cooked Tyrolian meals, for the
many casks of Burgwein and Burgschnapps, and generally for making our
stay at the castle an immensely pleasant one. We also wish to expressly
thank Eva Popp for the tireless effort she put into helping us organize the
workshop, communicating with participants, and making sure that every-
thing ran smoothly throughout. Without her, neither the conference nor
this volume would have been possible.
Compiling a collection of chapters by scholars from around the world
who found themselves in vastly different situations during an international
pandemic was no easy feat, and the challenges our authors faced—from
their changing roles as caretakers, policy makers, online instructors, schol-
ars-at-risk, and essential workers to their own struggles with illness, inse-
curity, and isolation—were not insignificant. Unfortunately, planned
contributions on a tenth-century Iraqi thinker, a fifteenth-century deaf
Spanish mystic, a seventeenth-century Persian illuminationist, and nine-
teenth-century German approaches to the historiography of philosophy
were lost to the political, personal, and academic fallout of the pandemic.
However, valuable contributions were also gained through various inter-
national online networks, and we are so grateful to those authors who
were able to step in at the last minute, as well as to those who battled
disease, quarantine, bereavement, loss of employment, depression, and
other challenges to provide us with their chapters. This volume is richer
for their contributions.
We therefore thank each one of our authors for working closely with us
during such a difficult time and for their patience with us and with each
other as this volume came together.
Finally, we wish to thank our respective spouses, Daniel and Johanna,
for their continued love and support.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Amber L. Griffioen and Marius Backmann

2 Anne
 Conway on Substance and Individuals 15
Andrew W. Arlig

3 Du
 Bois on the Centralized Organization of Science 31
Liam Kofi Bright

4 A
 New Perspective on Old Ideas in González de Salas’s
Nueva idea de la tragedia antigua 45
Elizabeth Cruz Petersen

5 Developing
 Political Realism: Some Ideas from Classical
China 63
Eirik Lang Harris

6 Philosopher
 of Samarqand: Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī’s
Theory of Properties 77
Ramon Harvey

7 Toward
 a Critical History of Philosophy: Hannah Arendt
and the Critique of the Meditative Tradition  91
Aminah Hasan-Birdwell

xi
xii Contents

8 “Pervading
 the Sable Veil”: Phillis Wheatley as Early
Modern Philosopher of Religion107
Jill Hernandez

9 The
 Waters of Which We Have Spoken: Reading
Marguerite Porete as Substance Metaphysics123
Lacey A. Hudspeth

10 Two
 Dogmas of Enlightenment Scholarship133
Seth A. Jones and Kristopher G. Phillips

11 “Novel
 Philosophy”: Mapping a Path for a Woman in the
Radical Enlightenment149
Rachel Kadish

12 Teaching
 Comparative History of Political Philosophy163
Eric Schliesser

13 Doing
 Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century West Africa179
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

14 Ibn
 Taymiyya’s “Common-Sense” Philosophy197
Jamie B. Turner

15 From
 Meditation to Contemplation: Broadening the
Borders of Philosophy in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth
Centuries213
Christina Van Dyke

16 Notes
 for an Indigenous Political Philosophy in New
Spain: On the Figure of Nezahualcóyotl231
Alejandro Viveros

Index249
 Notes on Contributors

Andrew W. Arlig is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn

College, which is part of The City University of New York, USA. He
specializes in the history of metaphysics, and in particular, he has written
extensively on theories of parts and wholes, substances, and identity in the
Western medieval tradition. He is presently working on a new annotated
translation of Anne Conway’s Principles along with Christia Mercer, Jasper
Reid, and Laurynas Adomaitis.
Marius Backmann is a London School of Economics (LSE) fellow in the
Department for Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London
School of Economics and Political Science, UK. His work focuses on
ontologically motivated attempts to solve the problem of induction, the
philosophy of time, metaphysics of science, laws of nature, and free will.
Before moving to the London School of Economics, he worked at the
University of Konstanz on a DFG-funded grant on The Metaphysics of
Induction, for which he considered the question whether the ontological
view that there are necessary connections has an influence on the solubility
of the problem of finding a justification of ampliative inferences. He has
also recently been working on the epistemology of randomized clini-
cal trials.
Liam Kofi Bright is an associate professor at the London School of
Economics and Political Science, UK, where he works on social epistemol-
ogy and Africana philosophy. He hopes the reader will enjoy his piece.

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Christina Van Dyke is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Calvin

University, USA. She specializes in medieval philosophy and philosophy of
religion, and has written extensively on philosophical issues in medieval
mysticism, Thomas Aquinas’s account of human nature and happiness,
Robert Grosseteste’s theory of cognition, and gendered eating. Her pub-
lications include A Hidden Wisdom: Medieval Contemplatives on Self-
Knowledge, Reason, Love, Persons, and Immortality (2022), a commentary
on Aquinas’s Treatise on Happiness and Treatise on Human Acts (with
Thomas Williams), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (edited
with Robert Pasnau), and Aquinas’s Ethics: Metaphysical Foundations,
Moral Theory, and Theological Context (with Rebecca DeYoung and
Colleen McCluskey).
Amber L. Griffioen is Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Duke Kunshan University, China, and Associate Professor of the Practice
in Global Studies at Duke University, USA. She researches and teaches on
topics in philosophy of religion, the history of philosophy, the ethics of
belief, comparative mysticism, social epistemology, bioethics, and philoso-
phy of sport. In addition to her collaboration with the “Extending New
Narratives in Philosophy” project, she was recently a residential fellow at
the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame,
USA, where she worked on topics in medieval mysticism, religious episte-
mology, and the philosophy of pregnancy and reproductive loss. Prior to
that, she worked for a decade at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She
is the author of a recent book on religious experience for the Cambridge
Elements series and is currently working on a monograph aimed at broad-
ening the borders of analytic philosophy of religion.
Eirik Lang Harris taught in South Korea and Hong Kong before mov-
ing to Colorado State University, USA. He has research interests in politi-
cal philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of law, with a focus on the early
Chinese tradition, especially views on the relationship between morality
and politics. One of the goals of his research is to demonstrate ways that
early Chinese philosophical traditions may be brought into dialogue with
contemporary philosophical concerns.
Ramon Harvey works on Qur’anic studies, philosophical theology, and
ethics. His first book was titled The Qur’an and the Just Society. He has
recently written a second monograph titled Transcendent God, Rational
World: A Ma ̄turı ̄dı ̄ Theology. He is the editor of a new series for Edinburgh
University Press: Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Scripture and Theology.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Aminah Hasan-Birdwell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emory

University. Her research is primarily invested in the history of philosophy,
history of political philosophy, twentieth-century philosophy, and philoso-
phy of race and gender. Specifically, Hasan-Birdwell attends to marginal-
ized figures in early modern philosophy and their contributions to
philosophical issues of ontology, political thought, and ethics, as well as
their relevance to combating the presence of racism and misogyny in the
philosophical canon.
Jill Hernandez is Professor and Dean of the Honors College at Texas
Tech University, USA. Her work juxtaposes questions in ethics, philoso-
phy of religion, and early modern philosophy and includes Early Modern
Women and the Problem of Evil: Atrocity & Theodicy (2016).
Lacey A. Hudspeth is the philosophy and religion reference librarian at
Duke Divinity School, USA. She did her graduate work at Emory and at
Harvard, and she served on the editorial board of the Harvard
Theological Review.
Seth A. Jones is Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Humanities at the
University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA. His work focuses on debates in
metaphilosophy and metaphysics in the early modern period. The bulk of
his professional attention is spent on improving students’ experience in
the classroom, especially in general education courses, and working to
promote the value of philosophy in interdisciplinary contexts.
Rachel Kadish is the author of the novels From a Sealed Room, Tolstoy
Lied: A Love Story, and The Weight of Ink, as well as the novella I Was Here.
Her work has appeared on National Public Radio (NPR) and in The
New York Times, Ploughshares, and Tin House, and has been anthologized
in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She was a fiction fellow of the National
Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council; received
the National Jewish Book Award, the Association of Jewish Libraries
Fiction Award, and the John Gardner Fiction Award; and was the Koret
Writer-in-Residence at Stanford University.
Elizabeth Cruz Petersen holds a Doctorate in Comparative Studies,
with a concentration in early modern Iberian literature and performance
studies, and a Master’s Degree in Spanish and Latin American Literature
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

from Florida Atlantic University, USA. Focusing on the relationship

between body, mind, and environment in the context of early modern
Spanish performance, her book Women’s Somatic Training in Early
Modern Spanish Theater demonstrates how early modern Spanish actresses
subscribed to various somatic practices in an effort to prepare for a role.
Her current manuscript examines the lives of five women in seventeenth-
century Spain who started and ran their own theater enterprises.
Kristopher G. Phillips is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern
Utah University, USA. He is a trained modernist, with research interests
in Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shepherd, the philosophy of
education, and precollege philosophy. He is the co-founder of the Utah
and Iowa Lyceum programs and currently serves as associate editor for the
journal Precollege Philosophy and Public Practice.
Eric Schliesser is Professor of Political Science at the University of
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a visiting scholar at the Smith Institute
for Political Economy and Philosophy, Chapman University, USA. His
publications include Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public
Thinker (2017), Newton’s Metaphysics: Essays (2021), and with Sandrine
Bergès, the translated and edited collection, Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on
Sympathy: A Critical Engagement with Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (2019). He has edited numerous volumes including (inter
alia) Newton and Empiricism, with Zvi Biener (2014); Sympathy, a History
of a Concept (2015), and Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (2017).
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and current
Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University,
Ithaca, NY, USA. His research interests include philosophy of law, social
and political philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana philosophy. His
writings have been translated into French, Italian, German, and
Portuguese. He has taught at universities in Canada, Nigeria, Germany,
South Korea, and Jamaica.
Jamie B. Turner is a doctoral researcher in the Centre for Philosophy of
Religion at the University of Birmingham, UK. His current research primar-
ily involves an exploration of the different trends of religious epistemology
within Islamic thought. His most recent publication is “An Islamic Account
of Reformed Epistemology” in Philosophy East and West. He is also the co-
author of “Islamic Religious Epistemology” in the forthcoming Cambridge
Handbook of Religious Epistemology (Cambridge University Press).
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Alejandro Viveros is a member of the Institute of Humanistic Studies

‘Juan Ignacio Molina’ at the University of Talca, Chile. His research sub-
jects develop a critical approach toward Latin American colonial studies
using translation studies, ethnohistory, and contemporary Latin American
philosophy. Currently, he is working on a research project focused on
political philosophy in colonial Indigenous chronicles of New Spain.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Amber L. Griffioen and Marius Backmann

1.1   Pluralizing Philosophy’s Past:

Three Approaches
There is much talk in professional philosophical circles today about how
“we” need to “expand” “the” historical philosophical canon. Yet while we
(the editors) agree that the motivations behind this claim are largely admi-
rable and that those who make it are generally in the business of trying to
create more inclusive spaces within the discipline of philosophy, we have
also come to see how this way of speaking is itself potentially problematic,
insofar as it speaks of a we who assumes the existence of a singular philo-
sophical canon that stands in need of expansion. This we, which is often
left relatively unexamined, is usually assumed to mean something like “we
philosophers” or “we in the discipline of academic philosophy,” yet in

A. L. Griffioen (*)
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Duke Kunshan University, Kunshan, China
M. Backmann
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of
Economics and Political Science, London, UK

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
A. L. Griffioen, M. Backmann (eds.), Pluralizing Philosophy’s Past,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13405-0_1
2 A. L. GRIFFIOEN AND M. BACKMANN

reality it tends to refer to members of Anglo-American-European philoso-

phy departments (or of departments modeled after such) who have
adopted or inherited one particular canon of figures and texts as an arche-
type for teaching the history of philosophical thought—a canon which is
overwhelmingly white, male, and European and which tends to divide up
the history of ideas into conventional eras and categories (e.g., ancient/
classical–medieval–renaissance–modern) that largely apply to the political
and cultural history of Western, Christian, Latin Europe. (The overarch-
ing title we gave to the conference that sparked this volume, “Expanding
the Canon: Transitions and Transformations in Medieval and Early
Modern Philosophy,” was itself indicative of this Eurocentric tendency.)
Now clearly this canon does need expanding, even from within its own
self-imposed borders. And much of the work that has been done in this
regard has therefore undertaken figure-based projects aimed at demonstrat-
ing the historical influence and/or philosophical relevance of, for example,
women, persons of color, and members of other traditionally marginalized
groups from within the confines of the Eurocentric canon and increasing
inclusivity with respect to these figures when reshaping how the canon is
taught and transmitted today.
However, the canon that dominates much of Anglo-American-­European
philosophy is not the only historical canon in the philosophical landscape.
And one of the potential problems of centering the aforementioned
“expansionist” model is that it continues to take the Eurocentric canon as
primary (and anything from outside the limits of this canon as secondary
or “other”) in ways that may serve to underscore, as opposed to under-
mine, some of the imperialist or colonizing tendencies already present in
the Anglo-American-European history of thought. Some philosophers
have thus adopted a more global approach to the history of philosophy that
focuses attention on other regional, religious, or cultural philosophical tra-
ditions and the canonical thinkers within those traditions. Such approaches
may be conducted from within the confines of these various non-Eurocen-
tric canons themselves, but they may also be comparative, or seek to locate
lines of influence between the thinkers of different global traditions.
Still other approaches seek to extend the boundaries of what can prop-
erly be called “philosophy” itself by exploring genres often overlooked or
actively marginalized from within their own contemporary philosophical
traditions. In some cases, this involves (re)claiming particular genres for
the realm of “philosophy proper” or otherwise expanding the notion of
“the philosophical” to include forms of thinking, writing, and performing
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

not generally considered under this category. In other cases, it involves an

attempt to show how the output of near-lying disciplines or literary genres
can be utilized fruitfully for more mainstream philosophical ends.
Importantly, these three approaches are by no means mutually exclu-
sive, and we think they all appropriately belong to the overarching project
of what we in this volume are calling pluralizing philosophy’s past. Indeed,
it is not uncommon to see overlaps in these approaches, as when one
attempts to incorporate more women into the history of medieval
European philosophy by looking at non-scholastic genres of religious
writing typically subsumed under the (itself not unproblematic1) label of
“mysticism” (Griffioen 2019), or when one tries to decolonize a particular
construal of African thought by exploring the ways ideas may be transmit-
ted by non-written means, for example, in oral traditions or in art (Wiredu
2009). At the same time, there is a significant lack of communication in
the discipline between the various factions of scholars focusing on each of
these particular strands of the pluralization project, sometimes resulting in
unproductive competition as opposed to fruitful cooperation. This vol-
ume hopes to go some way toward rectifying this problem.

1.2   Pluralizing Philosophical Pedagogy

Of course, the question of pluralizing philosophy’s past is not just histo-
riographical or methodological. It is also fundamentally pedagogical and
didactic: If we are really interested in promoting plurality in the history of
ideas, we must also consider the challenges that arise for the way the his-
tory of philosophy is taught and publicly transmitted. Indeed, since many
(if not most) philosophy students may not end up pursuing academic phil-
osophical careers, we need to think very carefully about the ways our pre-
sentation of the history of philosophical thought might impact how our
students come to see their own histories and the histories of those outside
their immediate sphere of contact when they leave the university setting.
Therefore, in addition to how we view and conduct historical research,
the way the history of philosophy is traditionally taught, especially in
Anglo-American-European departments, needs to change. The very
notion of, for instance, a historical “survey” course relies on the idea that
it is possible to distill the history of philosophy into a manageable set of

1
On a few of the problems with the term ‘mysticism,’ see, for example, Jantzen (1995) and
Griffioen and Zahedi (2018).
4 A. L. GRIFFIOEN AND M. BACKMANN

readings that every philosophy student needs to be familiar with in order

to be a full member of the profession. For example, in Germany (where
the editors spent the bulk of their careers), the history of philosophy is
often taught as a linear narrative that begins with a dusting of the Greek
pre-Socratics followed by a heavy dose of Plato and Aristotle, a bit of late
antiquity, some Neoplatonism (or at least Augustine), and a brief excursus
into medieval philosophy, before embarking on a lengthy discussion of
early modern white European men like Descartes, Leibniz, Locke,
Hobbes, Berkeley, and Hume, culminating in the thought of Kant, Hegel,
and German idealism, and perhaps concluding with a brief foray into
twentieth-century existentialist, postmodern, or early analytic thought.
We think that such a way of teaching the history of philosophy as a neat,
linear procession of dead, mostly European, mostly white men all building
on each other’s work (ignoring, as is customary, figures like Plotinus’ and
Augustine’s heritage and global legacy) is not just overly simplistic but
also intellectually irresponsible, potentially even dishonest. Indeed, we
hope that the reader of this volume will have taken up a collection like this
because they are already trying to broaden their own historical philosophi-
cal horizons and are already seeking to include voices, traditions, and
genres that have been neglected in the canon they have been trained to
perpetuate.
We thus think that the question should not necessarily be why we should
extend, expand, or even rid ourselves of the historical canons we were
raised with. If we really do value diversity, multiperspectivity, and inclusiv-
ity, we simply owe it to our students to present them the history of phi-
losophy in all its vastness, complexity, and messiness.2 The question then
becomes not why, but what we teach, and how. How does one incorpo-
rate, say, global philosophy into specialized courses, which are often neatly
compartmentalized according to traditional “western” categories? How
does one even design a historical survey course? Even if it is clear that the
history of philosophy is not a neat procession of roughly fifteen dead white
men (or however many weeks one might have available in a term) and

2
There is also some research to indicate that, for example, although philosophers tend to
associate philosophy with maleness (Di Bella et al. 2016), when women feel similar to the
kinds of people who become philosophers, they are more likely to continue on in philosophy
(Demarest et al. 2017). Something similar is likely also true for members of other marginal-
ized groups in particular philosophy cultures. Therefore, if we are also interested in raising
the visibility or representation of women and minorities in the discipline, there seems to be
an added incentive to pluralize the philosophical historical curriculum.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

should not be taught as such, widening the scope of the thinkers, texts,
and traditions presented in teaching the history of philosophy makes the
selection of texts with which an instructor will confront their students a
difficult task.
It is a task that the editors of this volume have themselves been faced
with and have found challenging: Prior to the conference we organized,
which would ultimately serve as the inspiration for this volume, we team-­
taught a semester-long seminar at the University of Konstanz titled
Forgotten Philosophers? Neglected Philosophies? in which we abandoned tra-
ditional thinkers and texts for less commonly treated ones. Marius
Backmann developed a half-year historical survey course at the LSE, and
Amber Griffioen is currently developing new courses in the history of eth-
ics and philosophy of religion. These endeavors have proved to require
walking a particularly wobbly tightrope. On the one hand, one tries to
treat the history of philosophy as the global and plural phenomenon that
it is, and on the other one still needs to do justice to the fact that, for bet-
ter or for worse, certain philosophers have been very influential in the
Anglo-American-European sphere.
We will not try to present a universal solution to the question of how to
design such a course here, nor even to provide the reader with sample syl-
labi, enough of which are now publicly accessible.3 Not only because it
would be inappropriate to attempt to do so, nonchalantly, in the introduc-
tion to such a collection as this, but because such a universal solution
simply does not exist. While designing the survey course at LSE, Marius
decided that he would abandon the idea of teaching the history of phi-
losophy as a linear progression altogether, and rather decided to cover a
certain range of philosophical areas, such as political philosophy, ethics,
epistemology, philosophy of mind, and so on, picking freely from the
global cornucopia of texts from dead philosophers and choosing
approaches he thought offered a particularly original or interesting posi-
tion or argument, figures that were particularly influential, or texts that,
across time and regional divide, manage to miraculously “bounce off” one
another. The result is eclectic, and maybe it has to be. In this case it was a
course that covered Aristotle as well as Master Kong, Plato as well as
Zhuangzi, the Nyāya-sūtra, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anton Wilhelm Amo,

3
See, for example, the APA’s Diversity and Inclusiveness Syllabus Collection (https://
www.apaonline.org/members/group_content_view.asp?group=110430&id=380970) or
the Diversity Reading List (https://diversityreadinglist.org).
6 A. L. GRIFFIOEN AND M. BACKMANN

and others. The guiding idea was to sensibilize students to the vast global
nature of our discipline, while trying to reign in the chaos by focusing on
a selection of topics that are especially relevant to the needs of a student at
that institution. For her part, Amber is following the advice of another of
the volume’s authors, Kristopher G. Phillips (Phillips 2017a, 2017b), and
abandoning the survey course in favor of a closer thematic approach
involving bringing just a handful of figures and traditions into conversa-
tion with one another, rather than attempting to provide a purportedly
“comprehensive” overview, on the one hand, and an overly eclectic philo-
sophical “smorgasbord,” on the other.
One might justifiably disagree with either approach. While the editors
of this volume would ultimately prefer abandoning the idea of a canon
altogether, however one approaches this discussion there is a clear need for
more material. Even if one tries to cling to the ideal of a single, more
inclusive canon when designing a more globalized and diversified histori-
cal course, one needs to decide what goes in said canon, just as one faces
the question of what to include in a course that follows a more eclectic,
let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom-approach or a narrower comparative
approach. The present collection is thus also designed to help the reader
with that decision, and perhaps even with its implementation. Not only do
the various authors in this volume offer contributions on a wide range of
thinkers, texts, and traditions, each chapter also offers some of the author’s
suggestions on how to integrate them into one’s teaching. Their
approaches are varied and are not always commensurate with one another,
but by including authors’ thoughts on pedagogical matters, we hope to
make it easier for the reader to decide what they themselves might want to
include in their courses, and how they might approach teaching it. Of
course, the selection offered in this book cannot be exhaustive. But it is a
start. And a start is what we can profit from when we set about designing
our courses.

1.3  Aims and Overview of the Present Volume

While no single volume can bring all the numerous strands of the immense
task of pluralizing philosophy’s past into view, let alone into conversation
with each other, this volume hopes to minimally create a starting point for
such dialogue. It aims to showcase the research of scholars who are work-
ing on various topics related to the pluralization of the history of philoso-
phy and to simultaneously introduce readers to diverse philosophical
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

figures, traditions, and genres with which they may be unfamiliar. As a

project aimed at pluralization, not merely “expansion,” this means that
the volume focuses more on the value of multiplicity over that of unity—
and on diversity over singularity of perspective and even purpose. The
history of philosophy (if one can even speak of a singular “history” in this
respect) contains as many ruptures and caesuras as it does continuities and
overlaps, and we do not want to shy away from this aspect of philosophy’s
past. Moreover, although each of our authors views the project of plural-
izing philosophy’s past as important and worthwhile, we do not impute to
them the same motivations for sharing this common goal, nor do we
expect that they share a unified vision of how that goal is best construed
or achieved. Our authors come from various regional, cultural, linguistic,
and academic backgrounds and find themselves at various stages in their
scholarly careers. They do not all share a common philosophical approach
or methodology, nor do they express their ideas in a unified stylistic man-
ner. We take this to be a virtue, not a vice, of the present volume—one
that can appeal to a wide range of readers and which displays the plurality
of approaches to contemporary philosophical writing and scholarship, in
addition to its emphasis on the plurality of philosophy’s past.
As the editors, we have therefore tried to resist, insofar as it is possible,
attempting to tie these essays together with a neat and tidy bow, other
than insisting that the contributions remain relatively short and reader-­
accessible. We have not attempted to organize the chapters by philosophi-
cal area, historical period, or geographical region, nor by gender, race,
ethnicity, or religion, since any attempt to do so within the confines of this
volume would be likely to erase relevant differences in favor of singularity
or reduction. Instead, in order to keep the emphasis on plurality, we have
decided to simply order the chapters by the last names of the authors.
However, to aid the reader in locating chapters of especial interest for their
purposes, in this final section of the introduction we provide a brief over-
view of each of the contributions in this volume and the broad contempo-
rary philosophical areas of interest under which each might be said to
fall—as well as possible cross-references and suggestions for fruitful cross-­
pollination with other essays in the volume as suggested by the authors
themselves. This may assist readers looking for topics relevant to their own
research and teaching interests in more easily locating the chapters that
will be of most relevance for them.
Andrew Arlig (Chap. 2) focuses on seventeenth-century English phi-
losopher Anne Conway’s metaphysical views on substance and individuals.
8 A. L. GRIFFIOEN AND M. BACKMANN

Although sometimes said to be a monist, Arlig argues that Conway is only

such in a very restricted sense. Moreover, her version of type monism at
the level of created substances results in the rather radical view that created
things can be converted into one another as they progress or regress mor-
ally and, contra Descartes, that there is no substantial difference between
minds and bodies. [cosmology, early modern philosophy, metaphysics,
philosophy of mind, women in the history of ideas; see also Harvey
(Chap. 6), Hernandez (Chap. 8), Hudspeth (Chap. 9)]
Liam Kofi Bright (Chap. 3) discusses W.E.B. Du Bois’ approach to
research allocation and planning during Du Bois’ tenure as the head of the
Atlanta Sociological Laboratory. Bright explores Du Bois’ very deliberate
and centralized approach to set the Laboratory’s research agenda and task
distribution between the individual researchers, which might serve as an
alternative to our contemporary incentive-based approach of distributing
research tasks, the latter of which fails to properly incentivize researchers
to, for example, replicate past research, or to conduct long-term, large-­
scale research projects. Taking into account the drawbacks of such a cen-
tralized approach, Bright explores how we might nevertheless harness
some of the benefits of Du Bois’ approach in democratizing research allo-
cation. [Africana philosophy, philosophy of science, social epistemol-
ogy, nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy; see also
Hernandez (Chap. 8), Jones & Phillips (Chap. 10), Táíwò (Chap. 13)]
Elizabeth Cruz Petersen (Chap. 4) brings the role that women actors
played in early modern Spanish theater into conversation with discussions
in feminist philosophy. She argues that reading Jusepe Antonio González
de Salas’ seventeenth-century manifesto on acting, Nueva idea de la trage-
dia antigua, through the lens of Shannon Sullivan’s notion of “transac-
tionally co-constituted bodies” can give us an enhanced understanding of
gender roles in early modern Spanish theater, as well as a better sense of
the importance of lived embodiment to both philosophy and theater.
[early modern philosophy, literature and theater, feminist philoso-
phy, philosophical pedagogy, women in the history of ideas; see also
Hudspeth (Chap. 9), Jones & Phillips (Chap. 10), Kadish (Chap. 11),
Van Dyke (Chap. 15)]
Eirik Lang Harris (Chap. 5) explores Shen Dao’s political realism, in
particular his view on the role of resentment—namely, that only by eradi-
cating the sources of resentment is it possible to build a stable society or
state. Harris notes that, on Shen Dao’s view, resentment arises only out of
the frustration of expectations that could possibly have been satisfied and
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

that the way to eliminate the sources of resentment is a political system

based on the rule of law, where the laws are not seen as being implemented
arbitrarily by individuals. When laws are perceived as inviolable, more like
laws of nature than subjective or arbitrary decisions, resentment is unlikely
to arise. The view thus stands in contrast both to modern ideas of the
individual accountability of members of government and legislature, but
also to the classical Confucian ideal of a wholly virtuous ruler. [Chinese
philosophy, moral and political philosophy; see also Schliesser
(Chap. 12), Turner (Chap. 14), Viveros (Chap. 16)]
Ramon Harvey (Chap. 6) looks in detail at the theory of properties put
forward by Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī, a tenth-century Sunnī theologian
from Samarqand (modern-day Uzbekistan). He concludes that al-Māturīdī
is best understood as an early representative of trope nominalism and that
he opposes the concept nominalism of some members of the Muʿtazilīte
camp. Harvey also shows how al-Māturīdī thereby rejects divine simplicity
as advanced by many Sunnī theologians and Muʿtazilīte thinkers, compar-
ing him to Duns Scotus in the Christian medieval tradition. [Islamic phi-
losophy, metaphysics, ontology; see also Arlig (Chap. 2), Turner
(Chap. 14)]
Aminah Hasan-Birdwell (Chap. 7) looks at a less commonly discussed
aspect of Hannah Arendt’s thought, namely her remarks on the history of
philosophy at large. In particular, she explores how Arendt uses the medi-
tative tradition as a way to frame that history and relate it back to the
concept of “thoughtlessness,” which is central to her own political
thought. According to Hasan-Birdwell, Arendt saw a shift in the meaning
of “thinking” between the aporetic model of meditation employed by
Socrates, which was ultimately still outward-looking, and that of the medi-
eval and modern adaptation of meditation in the Augustinian tradition,
which she claimed resulted in a turn inward. [historiography of philoso-
phy, metaphilosophy, political philosophy, twentieth-century philos-
ophy, women in the history of ideas; see also Jones & Phillips
(Chap. 10), Kadish (Chap. 11), Schliesser (Chap. 12)]
Jill Hernandez (Chap. 8) argues that the eighteenth-century African-­
American poet and former slave Phillis Wheatley can be read in the con-
text of discussions of narrative theodicy in philosophy of religion, given
the various ways her poems and letters grapple with the problem of evil.
Hernandez shows that although Wheatley appears at first glance to offer a
clear redemptive account of human suffering, the story might actually be
somewhat more complicated. Looking more closely at figures like
10 A. L. GRIFFIOEN AND M. BACKMANN

Wheatley, then, can open up new spaces for philosophers of religion to

fruitfully explore the questions and tensions surrounding the possibility
that the suffering of oppressed persons and groups might be eschatologi-
cally redemptive. [Africana philosophy, early modern philosophy, lit-
erature and theater, philosophy of religion, theodicy, women in the
history of ideas; see also Kadish (Chap. 11), Schliesser (Chap. 12),
Táíwò (Chap. 13), Turner (Chap. 14), Van Dyke (Chap. 15)]
Lacey A. Hudspeth (Chap. 9) explores the various complicated metaphors
that thirteenth-century French author Marguerite Porete employs in The
Mirror of Simple Souls, the work for which she was ultimately condemned
and executed, to illustrate how the human soul “returns to” and becomes
“annihilated in” the Divine. Hudspeth takes the reader through the vari-
ous alchemical metaphors of melting, burning, grinding, and dissolving
that Porete employs in her play, noting that if we read her as a philosopher,
not (merely) a mystic, we may end up with a complicated yet sophisticated
substance metaphysics that has heretofore gone largely ignored in the his-
tory of philosophy. [metaphysics, ontology, medieval literature, medi-
eval philosophy, women in the history of ideas; see also Arlig
(Chap. 2), Van Dyke (Chap. 15)]
Seth Jones and Kristopher G. Phillips (Chap. 10) argue that the tendency
of philosophical research and pedagogy surrounding the European
Enlightenment to emphasize the tight association of philosophy with sci-
ence gives rise to two “dogmas” of Enlightenment scholarship—namely,
one which privileges a very narrow concept of reason with respect to early
modern thinkers and another which privileges the restriction of
Enlightenment scholarship to a very narrow range of (largely white male)
figures who are (misleadingly) thought to embrace that concept of reason.
Employing the work of Margaret Cavendish as a guiding example, Jones
and Phillips show how addressing the second dogma by integrating tradi-
tionally marginalized thinkers into the canon of Enlightenment philoso-
phy can help correct the first dogma and the correlated tendency of the
academy to view the sciences and the humanities as wholly distinct enter-
prises. [early modern philosophy, metaphilosophy, philosophy of the
humanities, philosophical pedagogy, women in the history of ideas;
see also Arlig (Chap. 2), Bright (Chap. 3), Kadish (Chap. 11),
Schliesser (Chap. 12)]
Although not a philosopher herself, novelist Rachel Kadish (Chap. 11)
reflects on the ways fictional literature might be utilized in the philosophy
classroom to awaken interest in philosophy and combat stereotypes that
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

philosophy is dry and inaccessible. The chapter includes excerpts from

Kadish’s 2017 novel, The Weight of Ink, which tells the story of Ester
Valasquez, a young woman from a Portuguese Jewish refugee family in
seventeenth-century England, who establishes philosophical correspon-
dences with various prominent thinkers of her day. The novel serves as a
kind of literary thought experiment, asking what kinds of philosophical
issues may have concerned someone like Ester, as well as what it might
have taken for a woman of her background to be able to engage in philo-
sophical discourse in early modern England. [early modern philosophy,
Jewish philosophy, literature and theater, women in the history of
ideas; see also Arlig (Chap. 2), Cruz Petersen (Chap. 4), Hernandez
(Chap. 8), Jones & Phillips (Chap. 10)]
Eric Schliesser (Chap. 12) focuses on the way we teach the history of
political thought and explores how various contemporary textbooks in
this domain (and the typical survey courses that might employ them) still
tend to be extremely Euro-, Christian-, and male-centric. He argues that
implementing a more global, comparative approach creates promising
alternatives for teaching the history of political philosophy, and he pro-
poses two strategies for decentering the dominant narratives in this area.
The direct-voice approach involves giving voice to those “insiders” or
“outsiders” who explicitly challenge, criticize, or oppose the universality
of Eurocentric ideas, whereas the indirect-voice approach focuses on the
inclusion of traditions of thought that stand outside and/or predate
European modernity. Schliesser then goes on to explore both the benefits
of each of these strategies and the challenges that arise in their implemen-
tation. [metaphilosophy, philosophical pedagogy; see also Jones &
Phillips (Chap. 10), Hasan-Birdwell (Chap. 7)]
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (Chap. 13) examines how African contributions to the
history of philosophy have been systematically excluded from many philo-
sophical narratives. He discusses what he labels “problem moderns,” or
those canonical European thinkers who violate their own claims of the
equality and dignity of all human beings by excluding African-descended
peoples from the realm of rational humanity. He then turns his attention
to the “excluded moderns,” or those thinkers who both embraced and
transformed the ideas of modernity put forward by the problem moderns,
while at the same time challenging the latter on their inconsistencies—but
who continue to be largely excluded from the scholarship on modern phi-
losophy. Táíwò concludes by discussing the thought of nineteenth-century
West African excluded moderns like Alexander Crummell and Edward
12 A. L. GRIFFIOEN AND M. BACKMANN

Wilmot Blyden, arguing that they should be included in the annals of the
history of philosophy as active participants in and contributors to the dis-
courses concerning modernity. [Africana philosophy, early modern
philosophy, metaphilosophy; see also Bright (Chap. 3), Hernandez
(Chap. 8), Jones & Phillips (Chap. 10), Schliesser (Chap. 12)]
Jamie Turner (Chap. 14) compares Alvin Plantinga’s “Reformed epis-
temology” in analytic philosophy of religion, which was strongly influ-
enced by his reading of Thomas Reid’s “common-sense philosophy,” to
the epistemological approach put forward 400 years earlier than Reid by
the Islamic theologian Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya. He demonstrates how
Ibn Taymiyya’s externalist and foundationalist approach—which is cen-
tered on the Muslim concept of fiṭra, or the “natural disposition that God
instilled in [humankind]”—both anticipates Plantinga’s “proper func-
tion” argument concerning the so-called sensus divinitatis and opens up
space for a contemporary Muslim version of “Reformed” epistemology in
philosophy of religion. [comparative philosophy, epistemology, Islamic
philosophy, philosophy of religion; see also Harvey (Chap. 6),
Hernandez (Chap. 8)]
Christina Van Dyke (Chap. 15) explores how the popularity of the
meditative genre allowed European Christian women to become accepted
as authoritative “knowers” in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, despite
their being associated more closely with sensation and the body, as opposed
to with the intellect and the knowledge of “higher things.” Van Dyke
argues that as love came to be viewed as the primary means of achieving
union with God in both will and intellect, the focus on imagination and
the “paradoxically receptive activity” of contemplation in late medieval
meditations written by women allowed them a degree of epistemic and
ecclesial authority because of, not despite, their association with embodi-
ment and the senses. [epistemology, medieval philosophy, philosophy
of religion, women in the history of ideas; see also Hasan-Birdwell
(Chap. 7), Hernandez (Chap. 8), Hudspeth (Chap. 9)]
Alejandro Viveros (Chap. 16) seeks to show how Indigenous sources
can contribute to political philosophy. In particular, he focuses on two
Indigenous chronicles from New Spain as examples of mestizaje cultural,
which employ genres and concepts familiar to European readers in order
to demonstrate the moral and political legitimacy of pre-Hispanic Texcocan
society. These chronicles, which center on the Texcocan worship of the
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

deity Tloque Nahuaque and the just governance of the philosopher-poet-­

warrior-king Nezahualcóyotl, were employed to demonstrate that pre-­
Hispanic Texcocan society represented a kind of “proto-Christian”
monotheistic civilization made up not of subhuman “barbarians,” but
rather of rational, sophisticated, and “civilized” human beings. Viveros
argues that by including such texts in the way we approach and teach the
history of philosophy, we can open up “alter-native” scholarly horizons
regarding the role of Indigenous contributions to Latin American political
philosophy in the history of ideas. [indigenous philosophy, Latin
American philosophy, Meso-American philosophy, moral and politi-
cal philosophy, philosophy of religion; see also Harris (Chap. 5),
Hernandez (Chap. 8), Schliesser (Chap. 14), Táíwò (Chap. 13)]

References
Bella, Di, Eleanor Miles Laura, and Jennifer Saul. 2016. Philosophers Explicitly
Associate Philosophy with Maleness. In Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1,
ed. Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul, 283–308. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Demarest, Heather, Seth Robertson, Megan Haggard, Madeline Martin-Seaver,
and Jewelle Bickel. 2017. Similarity and Enjoyment: Predicting Continuation
for Women in Philosophy. Analysis 77 (3): 525–541. https://doi.org/10.1093/
analys/anx098.
Griffioen, Amber L. 2019. “Undressing” Philosophical Theology: Lessons from
Mechthild of Magdeburg. Blogos: The official blog for the Logos Institute of
Analytic and Exegetical Theology at the University of St Andrews. https://blo-
gos.wp.st-­a ndrews.ac.uk/2019/04/18/logia-­f or-­a pril-­2 019-­u ndressing-­
philosophical-­theology-­lessons-­from-­mechthild-­of-­magdeburg-­by-­amber-­l-­
griffioen/. Accessed April 01, 2021.
Griffioen, Amber L. 2022. Doing Public Philosophy in the Middle Ages? On the
Philosophical Potential of Medieval Devotional Texts, Res Philosophica
99(2): 241–74.
Griffioen, Amber L., and Mohammad Sadegh Zahedi. 2018. Medieval Christian
and Islamic Mysticism and the Problem of a ‘Mystical Ethics’. In The Cambridge
Companion to Medieval Ethics, ed. Thomas Williams, 280–305. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Jantzen, Grace. 1995. Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
14 A. L. GRIFFIOEN AND M. BACKMANN

Phillips, Kristopher G. 2017a. Non-Canonical Texts and Teaching the History of

Modern Philosophy: Why We Might as Well Go Ahead and Abandon the
Survey – Part I. Blog of the APA. https://blog.apaonline.org/2017/01/31/
non-­canonical-­texts-­and-­teaching-­the-­history-­of-­modern-­philosophy-­why-­we-­
might-­as-­well-­go-­ahead-­and-­abandon-­the-­survey-­part-­i/. Accessed
April 01, 2021.
———. 2017b. Non-Canonical Texts and Teaching the History of Modern
Philosophy: Why We Might as Well Go Ahead and Abandon the Survey – Part
II. Blog of the APA. https://blog.apaonline.org/2017/02/01/non-­canonical-­
texts-­and-­teaching-­history-­part-­ii/. Accessed April 01, 2021.
Wiredu, Kwasi. 2009. An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on
Philosophy and Orality. Research in African Literatures 40 (1): 8–18.
 CHAPTER 2

Anne Conway on Substance and Individuals

Andrew W. Arlig

On February 23, 1679, Anne Conway succumbed to one of the mysteri-

ous ailments that plagued her as an adult. While largely confined to her
home, Conway nevertheless was at the center of a vibrant, iconoclastic
intellectual circle. She was an enthusiastic student of philosophy and an
advocate for the then persecuted Quakers.1 Among her personal effects,
her friends discovered a small notebook containing some of her thoughts,
which she had composed “for her own use, with only a lead pencil and in
the minutest script” (Conway 1690, i).2 Some of her notes were illegible,
but her friends determined that the discernable ones should be

1
On the life and intellectual milieu in which Conway flourished, see Hutton (2003
and 2004).
2
All quotations of Conway’s Principles are from the 1690 edition, which is the basis for all
other editions of the Latin text. All translations in this chapter are mine, although they have
been checked against translations that will appear in an edition of the Principles being pre-
pared by Andrew Arlig, Christia Mercer, Jasper Reid, and Laurynas Adomaitis.

A. W. Arlig (*)
Department of Philosophy, Brooklyn College, New York, NY, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

Switzerland AG 2023
A. L. Griffioen, M. Backmann (eds.), Pluralizing Philosophy’s Past,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13405-0_2
16 A. W. ARLIG

disseminated. These were edited, translated into Latin, and in 1690 pub-
lished in Amsterdam under the title Principia Philosophiae antiquissimae
& recentissimae de Deo, Christo, et creatura id est de spiritu & materia in
genere (“The Principles of both the most ancient and the most current
Philosophy concerning God, Christ, and creatures, that is, concerning
spirit and matter in general”).3
The Principles is a unique, astonishing work. Conway develops a meta-
physics at odds with both the dualism of Descartes and the materialism of
Hobbes. She argues that a proper understanding of God’s essence and
attributes entails a reinterpretation of the Trinity that both Jews and
Muslims can embrace. She thinks beatitude is something that every cre-
ated thing can achieve. Indeed, Conway thinks there is literally all the time
in the world to do so, and thus she argues that all things eventually will be
redeemed. Given the environmental and political challenges that we pres-
ently face, Conway’s faith in human reason, her system’s emphasis on the
interconnectedness of all things, and her optimistic message about univer-
sal salvation might strongly resonate with students.
The beating heart of this unique artifact is a curious theory of sub-
stances. This theory has generated much interest among a small cadre of
scholars, and there has been considerable dispute about the contours and
details of this theory. In this chapter, I will offer an opinionated tour of
some aspects of this theory.

2.1   Conway’s “Monism”

Conway is sometimes described as a Monist. Monism comes in two broad
varieties:

Token Monism: There is only one particular thing.

Type Monism: There are possibly many particular things, but there is only
one kind of thing.

3
To these friends and anonymous translators we owe a tremendous debt, as no one has
been able to find the original manuscript. The extant seventeenth-century English version
(included in Conway 1982) is a translation of the 1690 Latin edition.
 2 ANNE CONWAY ON SUBSTANCE AND INDIVIDUALS 17

Parmenides is often interpreted as defending Token Monism, as is

Spinoza. Hobbes argues that everything that exists (including God) is cor-
poreal, and hence, he could be considered a Type Monist.4
According to Jonathan Schaffer (2010), there is also a kind of Monism
called “Priority Monism”:

Priority Monism: There are many particular things, but only one substantial
individual. Everything else that exists is either a part or property of this one
substance; these parts or properties are metaphysically posterior to the sub-
stance and thus are themselves not substances.

Schaffer has argued that, contrary to the common interpretation,

Spinoza is a Priority Monist, as are Platonists like Plotinus. With these
distinctions on board, I will now argue that strictly speaking Conway is
not a Monist in any of these senses.
According to Conway there are three kinds of substantial beings, or to
use her preferred terminology, three kinds of “essence,” “entity,” or
“nature”:5

1. God,
2. Christ, or “middle nature” (natura media)
3. Creature

The gap between these three grades is unbridgeable. No creature can

become God. Controversially, Conway maintains that the Second Person
of the Trinity, Christ, is not only essentially distinct from creatures, but
also from God. Since Christ is an emanation from God, he too is a

4
On this reading of Hobbes, see Principles ch. 9, S. 3–6. Conway also mentions Spinoza
(ch. 9, S.3 and 5), but she does not pay him as much heed. Indeed, there are reasons to think
that she is unfamiliar with Spinoza’s magnum opus, the Ethics.
5
Conway also thinks that beings have “modes,” or ways that they are, and “attributes.” We
might consider modes and attributes to also be things that are, and thus in a sense, beings.
Hence, for clarity, I characterize Conway’s position as one that pertains to substantial beings.
18 A. W. ARLIG

“created” being; indeed, he is “the first-begotten of all creatures” (Conway

1690, 30 and 35).6 Thus, even Christ cannot be or become God.7
The existence of this second essence is logically entailed by the fact that
some of the divine attributes can and, indeed, must be “communicated”
to, or shared with, the beings that emanate from the divine essence. In
particular, if the divine attributes of goodness and life were not communi-
cated, nothing else would exist.8 Other attributes, however, are incom-
municable. Her argument that there must be three distinct kinds of
substance focuses on one attribute in particular, namely, God’s immutabil-
ity. This immutability is an attribute of God that is incommunicable to all
creatures, including Christ. Thus, there is an essential gap between creator
and created, marked by an essential differentiating property (or what
Conway, following the logic of the ancient Greeks, calls a differentia) and
its contrary: mutability.
The next step in Conway’s argument, which she takes in Chap. 5, sec-
tion 3, is to identify three different kinds of substantial beings by establish-
ing an essential distinction between the middle nature and all other
created beings:

The first is what is altogether immutable. The second is what is mutable only
toward the good, so that something that is good by its nature can neverthe-
less turn out to be better. The third is such that, even though it is by its
nature something good, it could nevertheless change as much toward good
as from good toward bad. (Conway 1690, 33)

In this way, God-nature is defined as immutable being. Christ-nature is

being mutable only toward the good. And the remaining essence, creature-­
nature, is defined as being mutable both toward the good and toward the bad.
Conway then argues in section 4 of Chap. 6 that there are only three
kinds of substances. The three aforementioned substances “exhaust all the

6
The relation between the natura media and the historical Christ, which is primarily dis-
cussed in Chap. 5 of the Principles (Conway 1690, 29–40), is complicated and one that I
cannot relate here.
7
This is one of the ways in which Conway breaks quite dramatically from orthodox
Trinitarian theology. In her defense, Conway insists that once we reject Trinitarianism, and
particularly, the thesis that Christ is God, we remove one of the “stumbling blocks” that has
made it difficult for Jews and “Turks” (i.e., Muslims) to embrace the true path. See Principles
Chap. 1, S.7, Chap. 5, passim, and Chap. 6, S.5 (Conway 1690, 4, 30–40, and 50).
8
For more on life, and its concomitant properties, perception, and thought, see Section 4.
 2 ANNE CONWAY ON SUBSTANCE AND INDIVIDUALS 19

specific differentiae in substance that our minds can possibly conceive”

(Conway 1690, 46). The putative existence of a fourth, fifth, or sixth kind
of being is ruled out by the Principle of Parsimony. All the phenomena in
the universe can be sufficiently explained in terms of the three aforemen-
tioned kinds of beings, and thus, “no necessity forces us to acknowledge
anything extra” (ibid.). These arguments for three and only three kinds of
substantial being are grounded in one of Conway’s deepest beliefs, namely,
that the universe is intelligible and good.9 For the universe to be complete
and fully good, there has to be a middle substantial being, since otherwise
the gap between God and creature would be insurmountably vast. But
only one intermediary is required. Proposing more kinds of being adds
nothing to the rationality and goodness of creation. If anything, it would
make the world messier and harder to understand, and a perfect intelli-
gence does not make messy, irrational worlds.
Thus, if we consider the totality of substantial beings, Conway is clearly
neither a Type, nor Token, nor Priority Monist. The threefold division
into God, Christ, and Creature produces three (but only three) kinds of
substances or essences, and each kind is instantiated by at least one indi-
vidual. Now, as it so happens, the first two kinds of essence each have only
one token instance. Therefore, we could say that relative to the first kind of
substance, Conway is a Token Monist: There is only one particular that has
God-nature. Likewise, she is a Token Monist relative to the second kind of
substance. Of course, it is not all that remarkable to maintain that there is
only one God and only one Christ, and it is thus rather unilluminating, as
well as unnatural, to describe these views as Monistic. What has generated
interest among scholars and what has prompted some to call her a Monist
is what Conway says about the third level of being. For here, at least in the
surviving Latin, we see some ambiguity. At times, the translation mentions
creatura (a singular noun, meaning “a/the creature”), whereas in other
places, it refers to creaturae (“creatures” or “the creatures”). The singular
noun would seem to suggest that at the level of creature-nature, Conway
is a Token Monist, and yet her references to creaturae would seem to com-
mit her merely to a Type Monism relative to the third kind of substance.10

9
This does not mean that everything in the universe can be understood by a finite, human
mind. She only means to say that there is nothing that exists that is not part of the plan
developed and enacted by a perfectly wise creator.
10
For a survey of the evidence in favor of both readings, as well as an inventive compromise
solution, see Gordon-Roth (2018).
20 A. W. ARLIG

I favor a reading that commits Conway only to Type Monism at the

level of creatures. First, many of her references to “creature” in the singu-
lar seem to be references to a kind, or “species,” to which many particulars
belong, as for instance, when she says in section 4 of Chap. 6 that “crea-
ture, or the whole of creation, similarly is one substance or essence in its
species” (Conway 1690, 47–8, my emphasis).
Second, I think the texts that provide the strongest support for the
Token Monist interpretation are ambiguous. For instance, in section 4 of
Chap. 9, where she contrasts her metaphysics with that of Hobbes,
Conway concedes that “all creatures from the lowest to the highest are
originally one substance” (Conway 1690, 128–9). But that is all she con-
cedes: They were originally one substance. Nothing in this concession tells
us about how things are now, and it is consistent with a model of creation
that one could derive from Genesis 1, namely, that God first made a
homogenous stuff, creature-substance, and then proceeded to fashion
from this one stuff many individuals. Indeed, Conway consistently uses
the verbs “cut up,” “divide,” and “separate,” when describing God’s con-
tinuous creative activity.
Perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence for the Token Monist
reading can be found in section 4 of Chap. 7, where she talks about what
does not happen when God “cuts up” creature-substance:

For in whatever manner either spirits or bodies can be cut up or separated in

the whole universe from one another, they nevertheless always remain
united in this separation, given that creation, the whole of it, is always only
one substance or entity (tota creatio semper una tantum sit substantia vel
entitas), and there is no vacuum in it. How, then, can anything be separated
from itself? I mean by this that which is its proper nature, insofar as it is
considered as it originally was in its primordial and first being. (Conway
1690, 101–2)

I think Conway is stressing here that when individuation occurs it does

not alienate things from one another. The division of created substance
does not cause things to be separated physically, and it does not make
things different in nature from one another. The claim that the whole of
creation is “always one substance or entity,” however, is admittedly ambig-
uous. But even if Conway really means that the whole of creation is an
individual substance, this by itself does not definitively prove that she is a
 2 ANNE CONWAY ON SUBSTANCE AND INDIVIDUALS 21

Token Monist. After all, an aggregate consisting of all created individuals

is itself an individual created being.
But, one might retort, isn’t Conway suggesting that all created sub-
stances together form not an aggregate, but rather an organic whole or
system, just as the eyes, the hands, the torso, the feet, and so forth combine
to form a human body? Many Aristotelian philosophers, in particular,
would take the suggestion that the whole created substance is a system to
be an indication that there is only one individual substance, since on their
view no part of a substantial whole can be itself a substance (Pasnau 2011,
607–10). Isn’t this passage proof that Conway is at least a Priority Monist
relative to the third level of being?
If anything is clear in the Principles, it is that Conway has little admira-
tion for Aristotelians. And I find nothing in her work that suggests she
believes that parts of a substance cannot themselves be substances. If any-
thing, the opposite seems to hold, for as she says in section 5 of Chap. 3,
each created being is infinitely divisible into ever smaller “complete crea-
tures” (Conway 1690, 17).11 But I think the most compelling reason to
believe that Conway is merely committed to Type Monism at the level of
created being, and not Priority or Token Monism, is that this is exactly
what she needs in order to maintain her view about God’s justice. In the
next section, I will elaborate on this point and show why Conway’s view
of divine justice requires that there be a plurality of individual created
substances.

2.2   Created Individuals and Divine Justice

As was already mentioned, Conway’s God is a good and loving divinity
who creates everything by communicating some of the divine attributes
with his creation. In particular, and as we will discuss in a little more detail
below, God communicates life, perception, and thought to every created
being. In short, in their “original” state, creatures are pure created spirits.
But, as we also noted above, creatures are essentially capable of turning
not only toward the good, but also toward the bad. For Conway, sin has a

11
For more on what Conway might mean by “complete” (integrum), see Section 2.2.
22 A. W. ARLIG

profound impact on the manner (modus) in which creatures exist.

Nonetheless, Conway insists that all creatures will eventually return to the
original state. If they were to not do so, this would be a flaw in the divine
plan and contrary to divine justice. But creatures need help to turn back
from the bad to the good. This is the role of punishment in Conway’s
system: It redirects sinners and sets them on the path toward returning to
the original state. Conway also speaks as if some creatures are further
along the path toward the return to the original state of creatures. In this
section, I will argue that in order for this story of origination, sin, punish-
ment, and ultimately universal redemption to work, Conway must main-
tain that there are many individual created substances, and thus, that she
cannot be a Priority Monist, let alone a Token Monist, at the third level of
creature-nature.
Conway’s ontology includes only individual or particular things. She
denies that universals, such as the species Human or Horse, are things
(res); such items are merely constructions or abstractions of the mind
(Conway 1690, 45). But individuals come in two varieties, substances and
the things that belong to them, that is, their attributes and modes. To be
a substance, a thing must be a “complete” individual in the sense that it
must be something that is capable of existing in its own right, or, as Latin-­
speaking philosophers would put it, an ens per se (“a per se being”). For
example, commonsense tells me that my current height is a particular
whose being requires that I be. Without me, it does not exist at all. But I
do not depend on my height.
If commonsense is right, I am an individual per se being. And yet, on
the relativized Token Monist or Priority Monist readings of Conway, I am
not. On either of these two Monistic readings, there is only one com-
plete created substance and my created being does not contain the entirety
of created being. I may still exist, but due to my dependence on this sub-
stance, I would have to possess the status of an incomplete individual.
That is, contrary to a common way of thinking, I would have to be more
like my height than I initially imagined. The question is whether Conway
gives us any reason to think that we are modes or mode-like. I argue that
she does not, and in fact, she says things that make it quite difficult to read
her in this way.
As was mentioned above, Conway believes that each created being is
infinitely divisible into ever smaller “complete creatures.” In my view, this
is not a slip: Conway is committed to the claim that I am a complete, that
 2 ANNE CONWAY ON SUBSTANCE AND INDIVIDUALS 23

is, per se individual.12 She reveals this commitment by first arguing, as she
does in section 2 of Chap. 6, that in order for God to enact his justice, all
individuals must have stable identities:

First of all, can one individual be changed into another individual, either of
the same species or of a different one? This, I say, is impossible, since then
the very essences of things could be changed. But this would stir up a great
confusion, not only in Creatures, but even in God’s wisdom, which made all
things. For example, if this man could be changed into another one, namely,
Paul into Judas or Judas into Paul, then the one who sinned would not be
punished for that sin, but in his place the one who is innocent and excels in
virtue would. Also, it would turn out that the honest man would not acquire
a reward for his virtue, but the one immersed in vices would in his place. But
even if we supposed that an honest man were changed into another honest
one, such as Peter into Paul or Paul into Peter, clearly Paul would not receive
the proper reward but Peter's instead, and Peter would receive Paul’s, not
his own. This would be a confusion and it would not befit God’s wisdom.
(Conway 1690, 43)

If God is to punish the wicked and reward the good, God needs to be
able to distinguish the wicked from the good. This requires that individu-
als possess a stable identity across time and change.13 As Conway herself
rightly sees, this must hold if one wants the world to be intelligible. One
cannot have stable knowledge if the objects of one’s knowledge are con-
stantly in flux.
At minimum, Peter, Paul, and Judas must possess identities that are
stable across time. I claim that Conway needs something more than that.
Conway’s vision of punishment and reward is only possible if something
underlying the wicked person or the good person is stable enough to per-
sist through certain kinds of changes. This is because punishment or
reward is granted to something that has changed with respect to the prop-
erties of being good and being bad. This is perhaps easier to see in the case

12
More precisely, some part of what I presently point to when I say “I” is a per se indi-
vidual. See Principles, ch. 7, S.4 (Conway 1690, 108), where she argues that the “ruling
spirit” of a human is something that will persist indefinitely. In her discussion of the virtuous
horse (see below), she also suggests that it is only a part—the horse’s spirit—that goes
through the transformations described. For our purposes, we can safely ignore this
complication.
13
Conway might also be thinking, albeit inchoately, that individuals must be stable across
possible worlds. But pursuing this issue would take us too far afield.
24 A. W. ARLIG

of punishment, since Conway states in several places that creatures in their

original state were good. Thus, a wicked person is something that has
ceased being good and has become bad. And yet, it is hard to make sense
of such a change if something having to do with this person is not a per se
individual. Specifically, something has to be a substratum for the changes
in moral properties.
Furthermore, there have to be multiple, numerically distinct per se indi-
viduals acting as substrata in these cases. First, Peter’s substratum has to be
a distinct per se individual from Judas’ substratum, because it is not Judas’
badness that gets the punishment, it is Judas who does. He is punished
because he has become bad. Conway believes punishment is not retribu-
tive, but rather therapeutic. Judas is punished so that he can turn, dis-
charge his badness, and become good. Moreover, the substratum of Paul
must be a numerically distinct per se individual from the substratum of
Peter in order to make sense of what Conway says above about Peter and
Paul, who are both good men. Non-per se beings, and especially modes,
need that on which they depend not only to persist but also to be the very
individual things they are. For instance, my height necessarily modifies me,
and my twin’s height necessarily modifies my twin. My height cannot sur-
vive my destruction, nor can it jump and attach itself to my twin. Even if
we are both six-feet tall, his six-foot-ness and my six-foot-ness are neither
the same nor interchangeable. The same is true of Peter’s goodness and
Paul’s goodness. As we saw, Conway thinks it is crucially important that
God distinguish between Peter’s goodness and Paul’s goodness so that
each can receive his proper reward. Paul deserves what is entailed by Paul’s
goodness, not Peter’s. It seems that the only way to keep these two good-
nesses distinct is to anchor them in two per se individual created beings.

2.3  Type Monism, Type-Switching,

and Universal Salvation

If I am right, on Conway’s view, individual created beings like Paul are

individual per se beings. However, we have also seen that Paul, Peter, and
indeed every created per se individual are the same “in substance.” I want
to briefly show how this Type Monism at the level of creatures leads to
two remarkable features of Conway’s system.
If all differences at the level of creatures are merely differences in
“mode,” and not substantial differences, then aside from the attributes
 2 ANNE CONWAY ON SUBSTANCE AND INDIVIDUALS 25

that apply to all created substances (such as mutability toward both the
good and the bad, or as we will see in the final section, life), all other
predicates that are predicable of Paul (e.g., “is a human”) or of Browny
(“is a horse”) are merely indications of the nominal species of things.
Nominal species pick out things possessing relatively stable clusters of fea-
tures, features which in turn allow us to group things together into classes
associated with these common nouns. But while they are natural in some
sense (as opposed to being gerrymandered), these nominal species do not
pick out real essential distinctions in the universe.
Given that all individual created substances have the same substantial
nature, as Conway says in section 5 of Chap. 9, “all species of creatures
can be converted into one another, and thus the least may become the
best and the best (as it was in its proper nature in the beginning) the
least” (Conway 1690, 131). By this, Conway does not merely mean that
each and every created substance can be converted into any other cre-
ated substance, in the sense that my hamburger can be converted into
human flesh after I digest and metabolize it, or that my flesh can be
converted to dirt or to maggot flesh later on.14 She maintains something
much more radical: The same created per se individual can progress
“upward” (or descend “downward”) and, accordingly, it can belong to
different nominal species. In other words, reward and redemption
involves the conversion of Paul from a lower nominal species of created
thing (say, a worm or a horse) to the highest form of created thing
(which seems to be pure, created spirit).15
All this she illustrates in section 6 of Chap. 6 in a remarkable discussion
of the reward given to an individual, virtuous creature who just happens
to presently be a horse. (It will be important for what follows to appreciate
that, for Conway, Horse is the nominal species that lies just below that of
Human.) Conway’s imagined virtuous horse is not only strong, it has “a
kind of comprehension of how it ought to serve its master” (Conway
1690, 51). It is also courageous, it fears and loves, and it remembers
things. In short, it possesses a host of the psychological qualities that
humans also possess. Conway considers the fate of this individual who was
a horse that has excelled in its virtues once it dies.

14
Although, I concede that this kind of mundane conversion seems to be foremost in her
mind in the text just quoted.
15
See the final section of this chapter for more on this.
26 A. W. ARLIG

First, she rules out the possibility that the virtuous horse will merely
cease to exist. A just and omnibenevolent God would not annihilate any-
thing that exists, for to do so he would be annihilating something that is
good. In fact, God’s justice and goodness requires that it be reborn as
something that is at least as noble as it was before, if not better. Thus, this
individual who has been a horse will return as at least a horse, a bet-
ter horse.
Suppose that this individual who has been a horse and now again is a
horse continues to improve. What then? As we have already established,
the individual who has been a horse cannot at any point cease to be. But if
it has been good, it has to persist as something better. Moreover, as the
world as a whole improves, which is something that Conway claims is
“universally held,” eventually horses would have to cease to be horses:

For if the earth were to assume another form, it would not produce grass
anymore, and horses and other animals would cease to be the kind of ani-
mals that they had been before. Given that they would not have their proper
nourishment, they could not remain the same in species. (Conway
1690, 52–3)

If horses are by nature herbivores but the world ceases to have any
grass, then anything that survives in this new world cannot be a horse. It
is either that, or God would be committing an injustice. If the world
changes so that there is no more vegetation, it would be a hardship—a
punishment—to this virtuous individual to be brought back as a horse.
In short, Conway is painting her opponent into a corner. Her opponent
insists that horses are substantially different from humans. But this leaves
the opponent without any acceptable options. In this new world without
food fit for horses, her opponent can only cling to the substantiality of
horseness by accepting one of two things: (1) Eventually a virtuous crea-
ture must cease to be, or (2) God sets things up so that some of his cre-
ation is eventually worse off. Given that God is omnibenevolent, he will
not suffer either of these options.
Conway finally proceeds to close off the possibility that horses and
humans are different due to an unbridgeable difference in mode. As
Conway sees it, in order to maintain that something that is a horse can
never convert into a human, a human would have to differ from a horse in
an infinite number of ways (modus). But this too is impossible:
 2 ANNE CONWAY ON SUBSTANCE AND INDIVIDUALS 27

If the difference is infinite, then one would thereby attribute to humans—

even those who possess the vilest or basest character—a certain actually infi-
nite excellence, the like of which applies only to God and Christ, not to any
creature. (Conway 1690, 53–4)

Thus, an individual horse, given enough time and provided it continues

to improve, will eventually become human.16 For that matter, humans too
will transform into something greater. This is where Conway’s remarkable
and attractive picture of universal salvation comes into view: If any created
being—even a speck of dirt or dung—continuously improves,17 it too will
continually progress upward until it reaches the highest form of created
substance, the substance it had “originally.” Conway does not say as much
as about this process as we might wish, but the endpoint of moral improve-
ment is clear enough: At the end of the day all created substances will exist
in the manner in which purely spiritual substances exist. This is the second
consequence of Conway’s Type Monism at the third level of being. In the
final section, I wish to highlight this anti-dualism and briefly discuss how
one might set up Conway as an interlocutor to Descartes in a course on
early modern philosophy and possibly also a course on philosophy of mind.

2.4  An Attack on Substance Dualism

Descartes famously proposed a form of Type Pluralism at the level of cre-
ated being. Specifically, he argued that mind and body are essentially dis-
tinct kinds of being. Conway’s system refuses to provide any space for such
an essential divide: The difference between being a body and being a men-
tal, or “spiritual,” thing is merely due to the manner in which they exist.
In fact, Conway spends all of Chap. 7 and a large portion of Chap. 8 in the
Principles arguing against Descartes’ Type Pluralism. Some of these argu-
ments will be familiar to readers of the traditional commentaries on
Descartes. For instance, Conway rehearses a version of the problem of
mind-body interaction, posed perhaps most famously by Princess Elisabeth

16
Conway believes that the first of these antecedent conditions does in fact hold: Just as
there are an infinite number of creatures and worlds, there is an infinite amount of time.
These follow from God’s omnipotence and goodness: God can do it, and since God wants
to make as much good as possible, he will do what he can. See, especially, Principles Chap. 2.
17
This doesn’t mean that dirt has thoughts or intentions in any respect like we do. But it
does mean that even the lowest of created beings—and here Conway explicitly mentions dirt
and dung—are not permanently blocked from acquiring higher-order capacities.
28 A. W. ARLIG

of Bohemia in her letter to Descartes, dated May 6, 1643 (Elisabeth

and Descartes 2007, 62). But her two core arguments, which appear in
section 2 of Chap. 7, spring from premises that Conway shares with many
others in her day and age. The first argument is metaphysical: Conway
insists that God cannot communicate mere being (ens) to things, since
mere being is not an attribute. Rather, God must communicate a kind of
being (tale ens), and in particular, he must communicate to all creatures
such attributes as goodness, life, perception, knowledge, love, and power.
Thus, there could be no created being that is “dead,” that is, absolutely
devoid of these attributes (or, perhaps better, absolutely incapable of
acquiring these attributes). The second argument—which appears almost
as an afterthought, but is on reflection, quite powerful—appeals to God’s
justice:

Is it not the case that God created all his creatures to this end: that they be
blessed in him and that they enjoy his divine goodness in their various states
and conditions? But how could this come to be without life or perception?
Or how could anything that lacks life enjoy divine goodness? (Conway
1690, 80–1)

In other words, Conway finds it inconceivable that an omnibenevolent

and perfectly just God would make it such that some parts of his creation
could never be blessed.
Here is a place where Conway’s Principles could easily find a home in
an early modern curriculum, side by side with Descartes’ works. This
would be especially advantageous since students would witness a debate
between two individuals who share an initial framework and sensibility.
Also, many of Conway’s arguments are reductiones ad absurdum that start
from specifically Cartesian assumptions. So, even if it should turn out that
Conway’s conclusions don’t stand up to scrutiny, her arguments can help
students to see precisely what seventeenth-century Type Pluralism, and
especially Cartesian dualism, is committed to and how it seems to close off
the possibility of universal salvation.
This is only one possible way to include portions of Conway’s Principles
into a course. As I mentioned at the start of this essay, Conway’s remark-
able philosophy should appeal to us on a number of fronts. She has ideas
that seem to bear on a number of our present-day concerns, including (to
name only a few) religious tolerance, the meaning of pain and suffering,
and environmental ethics. Accordingly, Conway’s little book of personal
ruminations might find a place in any number of undergraduate and grad-
uate courses.
 2 ANNE CONWAY ON SUBSTANCE AND INDIVIDUALS 29

Recommended Reading
Conway, Anne. 1982. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.
Ed. Peter Loptson. The Hague / Boston / London: Martinus Nijhoff.
Hutton, Sarah. 2004. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Mercer, Christia. 2019. “Anne Conway’s Metaphysics of Sympathy.” In Feminist
History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women's Philosophical
Thought, eds. Eileen O’Neill and Marcy Lascano, 49-74. New York: Springer.
Reid, Jasper. 2020. Anne Conway and her Circle on Monads. Journal of the History
of Philosophy 58: 679–704.

References
Conway, Anne. 1690. Principia Philosophiae antiquissimae & recentissimae de Deo,
Christo, et creatura id est de spiritu & materia in genere. In Opuscula philo-
sophica quibus continentur Principia Philosophiae Antiquiassimae et
Recentissimae, ac Philosophia Vulgaris Refutata, quibus subjuncta sunt
C.C. Problemata de Revolutione Animarum Humanarum. Amsterdam.
———. 1982. In The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed.
Peter Loptson. The Hague / Boston / London: Martinus Nijhoff.
Elisabeth of Bohemia, and René Descartes. 2007. The Correspondence between
Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes. Edited and translated by Lisa
Shapiro. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Gordon-Roth, Jessica. 2018. What Kind of Monist is Anne Finch Conway? Journal
of the American Philosophical Association 4: 280–297.
Hutton, Sarah. 2003. “Lady Anne Conway.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. Last modified
December 22, 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/
conway/.
———. 2004. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pasnau, Robert. 2011. Metaphysical Themes, 1274-1671. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Schaffer, Jonathan. 2010. Monism: The Priority of the Whole. The Philosophical
Review 119: 31–76.
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The next morning, bright and early, they were again ready to start.
The dolphin, who knew now where he was, began to rise to the
surface. A few hours later he had reached the place Tursio had
spoken about.
“Here we are at last!” he cried.
“Here? Why, where is the ship?”
“There,” answered Marsovino,
pointing to a great black mass which
showed through the water.
“That! Why look how it is trimmed!”
And he was indeed right. The
inhabitants of the sea had taken
possession of everything. The keel of
the ship was overgrown with beautiful
slender seaweeds. The decks were
covered with sponges. The stairs had
disappeared under the work of polyps.
On the lookout bridge hundreds of anemones raised their brightly
colored corollas. The needles of sea urchins threatened passers-by
from the portholes. Silvery fishes and starfishes were seen all over.
Everything was living on the dead ship.
“Now let us hasten,” said Marsovino.
“Very well,” answered Pinocchio.
“We have been so long in coming that now we must be quick,”
continued the dolphin.
“Father must be worried. Let us look for the treasure, and then we
can begin our return journey to-night.”
“Very well,” again assented Pinocchio.
“Make haste, then. Get into that ship. Don’t lose any more time.”
“Come, let us go.”
“Let us go! How can I go? Don’t you see how small the doors are?
You must go alone!”
Pinocchio did not like the idea. He stood still and thought. His
courage utterly failed him. To go alone into that great black ship!
Why, how could he do such a thing?
“Well, what are you thinking of?” asked Marsovino, who had dropped
Pinocchio at the door of the stairs.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet. I don’t like the idea of going in there
very much.”
“But you must. I can’t go, and we must have the gold. Will you
decide? I thought you had offered to help Mr. Tursio.”
When he heard that, Pinocchio finally made up his mind. He opened
the door and went down a few steps. Then he stopped.
“Must I really go?” he asked.
Marsovino began to lose his patience.
“If you do not make haste getting into that ship, I shall return without
you,” he could not help saying.
“Very well. Here I go.”
“You remember Tursio’s instructions, don’t you? At the bottom of the
stairs there is a large room. At one end a door leads into the
captain’s room. In a corner of the captain’s room, you will find two
boxes. They contain the treasure. Good-by and good luck.”
Very slowly Pinocchio went down. Luckily for him a few sunfishes
were floating around, giving some light.
When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he saw in front of him a
large square room. In the walls were long narrow holes, like the
shelves of a pantry. These had probably been the sailors’ bunks. But
to Pinocchio they were puzzles.
The roof, which was very high, was of glass. This made the room
lighter than the stairs, and so Pinocchio took courage.
At one end of the room there was a small narrow door. Pinocchio
walked to it and tried to open it. Still, though the door was not locked,
it would not open. It seemed as if some one were holding it closed
from the inside. The marionette pushed it, kicked it, struggled with it,
and finally he succeeded in opening it. He was able to put just the tip
of his nose in the crack.
He had no sooner done this, though, than it was held as in a vise.
Pinocchio felt something pulling and pulling.
“My nose will surely come off,” he thought; but after trying and trying
he was at last free again.
“I wonder what that was? What can be behind
that door? In any case it may be better to
have some weapon of defense,” and thinking
this, Pinocchio looked around.
“Those shelves may hold something useful.”
But when he came near them, what did he
see? A mattress, pillows, sheets!
“What could this have been? A hospital?”
Poor Pinocchio! He was most certainly a
dunce!
On the floor in a corner he found a pair of
large boots.
“These will do,” he thought.
Again he pushed the door. This time he was
able to open it wide. As soon as he had done
so, he threw a large boot in blindly. Had he never done so, it would
have been better! In a second the room became as black as pitch.
“Marsovino! Oh! Oh! Oh! Marsovino!” screamed the poor boy,
thinking himself blinded.
The dolphin, waiting for Pinocchio at the head of the stairs, became
frightened at this appeal. He thought something serious had
happened. He swam to the top of the deck and broke several panes
of glass. Looking into the room he called: “What is the matter? I am
here.”
Pinocchio felt a little better when he saw Marsovino.
“Oh, Marsovino!” he cried.
“What has happened, my poor Pinocchio?”
“I have found a bottle of ink.”
“A bottle of what?”
“Of ink. I threw a boot at something, and now the room is full of ink.”
“Oh, now I understand. You have to deal with an octopus.”
“What’s that?”
“A mollusk.”
“Oh, if that’s what it is, I’m not afraid. I know them well.”
 “‘Marsovino! Oh! Oh! Oh!’”

“Yes, but not this one. This is the greatest mollusk known. It is a near
relation of the calamary, but much larger. There are some even five
or six yards long.”
“Oh!” shivered Pinocchio, looking around.
“The one in the captain’s room must be a small one, though. If I were
with you, I should free you in a second. There is nothing a dolphin
likes better than an octopus or a calamary.”
“But the ink?”
“The ink is the means of defense of these mollusks. When pursued
or in danger, this animal ejects this inky liquid. In that way, it forms a
cloud in the water and is able to escape.”
“Shall I be killed?”
“If you keep out of reach of its long arms, you will be all right.”
“Oh, now I see what got hold of my poor nose. It is aching yet. Now
tell me, Marsovino, if this animal is guarding the treasure, how shall I
possibly get at it? We might as well give it up,” and Pinocchio started
towards the stairs.
“How very courageous you are! After trying so hard, are you going to
give up at the last minute?”
Pinocchio did not answer, but very
slowly he retraced his steps. Going
over to the bunks, he took a large
mattress. Holding it in front of him, he
moved toward the door, which was
still ajar.
The water from the captain’s room
had mixed with the water of the large
room, and now it was not so dark.
Very cautiously, the marionette
peeked over the mattress.
In a corner of the room lay the poulpe
or octopus. As Marsovino had said, it
was not very large. Still it was very
ugly.
Think of a large head, soft and jellylike, with two great eyes staring at
you. Think of that head and eight long thick arms around it. No
wonder Pinocchio felt like turning back.
The monster moved restlessly about, stretching and twisting its
arms. In one of them it held Pinocchio’s boot. Every minute its huge
body changed color. At first it was white, then gray, then brown, then
spotted with purple. Pinocchio hardly knew what to think of it.
“You are certainly very ugly, my dear bottle of ink,” he thought.
“Well, why am I standing here? I might as well try to kill him. Hurrah!
Here comes the brave marionette!”
Very slowly Pinocchio walked up to the octopus, but not near enough
to be in reach of those arms. Then with a quick move he threw the
mattress over the struggling mass. Pressing it down tightly, he held it
there.
For a long time the arms twitched nervously about, but at last they
stopped moving. The boy waited a few minutes longer, and then,
thinking the creature dead, he stood up.
The mattress, however, he left on top of the poulpe. Not only that,
but running back, he took another and put it on top of the first. He
wanted to be sure the octopus would not move. At last he breathed
easily and set to work to get the boxes.
Yes, think of it! That lazy marionette really set to work. He dragged
the boxes one after the other into the large room, and then he called
Marsovino.
“Here is the treasure, Marsovino. Now how am I to carry these heavy
boxes upstairs?”
Marsovino then lowered a stout rope which he had carried with him.
Pinocchio tied the boxes to it, one after the other, and the dolphin
pulled them up.
“Throw the rope down again, Marsovino!”
“What for? Are there three treasure boxes?”
“You will see.”
As soon as the end of the rope touched the floor of the room,
Pinocchio tied it around his waist. “Now pull!” he called.
Marsovino pulled, and in a second
Pinocchio stood on the bridge.
“I really had no wish to return by those
dark dusty stairs,” he laughed, seeing
Marsovino’s look of wonder.
 CHAPTER XV
At last the two had done their duty. The treasure
was theirs. All that remained now was to go back to
Tursio with it.
“Let us start this minute,” said Marsovino, who was
anxious to see his father again.
“Yes, but first please give me something to eat.”
“Should you like to have some grapes?” said Marsovino, kindly.
“I don’t see the use of making my mouth water needlessly,”
answered Pinocchio.
“But I mean what I’m saying. Should you like some grapes?”
“Show them to me first. Then I’ll answer you.”
“Come here then, unbeliever.” As he spoke, Marsovino led Pinocchio
to a mast, which, strange to say, had not been touched by the
polyps. Hanging from a slender thread was a bunch of what looked
like red grapes.
“What are they?” Pinocchio could only ask.
“Don’t you see? They are sea grapes. Eat them.”
“But first I want you to tell me what they are.”
“They are the eggs of the calamary, a near relation of the octopus
you had to deal with to-day.”
“Very well, then. I’m willing to destroy all sign of those horrible
beings.” In a short time Pinocchio had made a good luncheon out of
them.
 “‘What are They?’”

Luncheon finished, Marsovino gave Pinocchio the box of pearls

which he was holding for the marionette. Then the dolphin tied the
treasure boxes on his back, and the two friends were ready to start.
They again passed the beach where the seals had had their battle.
Now it was full of men. Some were skinning the poor animals. Others
were pressing out the oil from their bodies. Still others were
spreading the skins out on the sand to dry.
Again the two travelers came into the polar seas. Here they found a
great change. Icebergs had melted, and the sea was full of floating
ice.
At last, without meeting any mishaps, the two again entered the
warmer ocean. They had gone only a few miles when Pinocchio
heard a great noise behind him. Both friends turned. On the calm
surface of the sea rose two high columns of water.
“The whale!” exclaimed Marsovino.
“Nonsense, whale!” answered Pinocchio, who now and then still
forgot how little he knew. “Don’t you see it’s a fountain? How could
an animal send the water so high?”
“Still it is the whale. You are just seeing a cetacean breathe.”
“You are a cetacean, too. But I see only one hole in your head, and
the jet of water you throw is very low.”
“Yes, we are cetaceans, but we are not whales. The whale proper
has two breathing holes.”
“Mercy! what a noise that monster does make!” breathed Pinocchio.
“Now, if she comes near us, we’ll disappear.”
“Have no fear, Pinocchio. The whale, although such a large animal,
is quiet and harmless if you let her alone. She is even timid. And
don’t think that because her mouth is large she can eat large
animals.”
“Her mouth may be large, but her throat is so small that she can
swallow only very small fishes. If we had met the cachalot, or sperm
whale, we should have reason to be frightened.”
“And what is that?”
“It’s an immense cetacean. You can tell it from the common whale,
not only by its one breathing hole, but also by its size. The head
alone is enormous, and its mouth is frightful with its many large
sharp teeth.”
“Hasn’t this whale teeth?”
“No. But instead of teeth, its upper jaw is lined with at least seven
hundred plates of a thick horny substance. These plates are often
twelve and fifteen feet long.”
“When the whale wants to eat it opens its huge mouth, and then
closes it full of water. This water is then strained through the plates,
and hundreds of small fishes are caught in them. The whale can
then swallow her dinner at her leisure.”
“What a dinner!” exclaimed Pinocchio. “Now tell me this. Why is it
that so many whales are captured by whalers? You say that they are
harmless. Why, then, should they be killed?”
“They are caught because of their value. Those horny plates I spoke
of are what is called whalebone. The large tongue of the whale
contains many barrels of oil. From the body of the whale great
quantities of fat may be had. All these things are of great use in the
world.”
“What about that other whale you
spoke of? The one with the terrible
teeth.”
“The sperm whale? Oh! that one is a
dreadful being. With its great mouth
and sharp teeth it can eat anything.
Seals, dolphins, and even the terrible
squaloids are lost, if they come near
him. He is very ferocious.”
While Marsovino and Pinocchio were
talking, the whale had come nearer.
The marionette saw a small dark
object climb on her back.
“What is that?” he asked.
“That’s a baby whale. Whales are very affectionate mothers. The
baby whale is tired, so the mother is going to carry it.”
Suddenly a dark head and body rose out of the water. Like an arrow
it threw itself on the poor whale. With its large mouth it tore a great
piece of flesh from the cetacean’s side and then disappeared into the
waves.
“Mercy! The sea wolf!” cried Marsovino, looking around for some
place to hide.
“What is the sea wolf? The name does not sound terrible.”
“It is the most dangerous and fierce squaloid. It is even worse than
the hammer! Let us run!” said Marsovino, breathlessly.
“But if we run the wolf will run after us.”
“You are right. Where shall we hide? Oh, here! Let us try to get
among these weeds.”
Near them was a large plant. Its leaves would make a very safe
hiding place. Pinocchio stood on Marsovino’s back and pushed the
leaves aside. In a short time the two were so well hidden that no
eyes could see them.
“Here we are safe,” and the dolphin
gave a sigh of relief.
“And how well we can see.”
Pinocchio, like the boy he was,
wanted to see the fight.
In fact, a short distance away, a terrific
fight was in progress. The wolf had
now attacked the baby whale. This
made the mother furious. She tried to
hit the shark with her tail, but he was
too quick for her. The poor cetacean
was getting the worst of it. The wolf’s
mouth, provided with four hundred
sharp teeth, was tearing the whale’s
side to pieces. Blood was pouring from them both, and it seemed as
if the whale could not hold out much longer.
A second dark body now made its appearance. It was as long as the
whale, but much larger. Its head was enormous, and from the top of
it rose a single high column of water.
“The sperm whale! The cachalot!” breathed Marsovino, and it
seemed to Pinocchio that the dolphin turned pale.
It was not to be mistaken! It was the terrible whale! And he seemed
not at all frightened by the sight of the fighters. Instead, opening wide
his mouth—and such a mouth—he threw himself on them. With a
snap of the great jaws the sea wolf’s tail disappeared.
And then, as if the battle were not fierce enough, a long bladelike
object appeared on the scene. The sides of the blade were provided
with sharp teeth. Behind the blade was a dark head. The new arrival
was the sawfish, coming to see what the matter was. Without much
ado it started to deal blows, first on this side, then on that.
Not even the sperm whale escaped the terrible saw. Long ragged
tears were soon seen on its body. Cries of pain were heard on all
sides. The sea was a sea of blood.
Finally the whale, seeing that she was lost if she stayed there long,
tried to escape. As swiftly as she could, she swam away with her
baby.
Though the whale was gone, the fight
still raged. The wolf and the saw,
although both of the same family, are
sworn enemies. Not paying much
attention to the sperm whale, they
started to battle with each other. But the
wolf was so exhausted by the loss of
blood that it could not do much. The
cachalot, seeing himself overlooked,
threw himself on the sawfish. But as
quick as a flash the sawfish dived and
came up on the other side of the giant. Angrier than ever, the whale
now turned to the wolf and in an instant snapped his head off.
The whale was satisfied. Pouring blood from twenty wounds, he left
the field of battle. The sawfish was left alone in all his glory. He was
hurt but little. Very calmly he started to make a dinner of the sea
wolf, or at least of what was left of him.
The dolphin now thought it safe to try to escape. Once out of the
weeds, he fled as fast as he could.
Poor Pinocchio could only sit still and look around. He feared any
minute to see a hammerhead or a wolf or a whale appear before
him.
“Oh! how horrible, how awful is the sea!” he thought.
 CHAPTER XVI
After racing along madly for a while, Marsovino
became so tired that he had to stop.
“I must rest,” he said to Pinocchio.
“Very well, I’m willing,” answered the marionette.
In front of them the two friends could see a dark
mass. Seen from the sea, it looked like a strip of
land. But on approaching, one could see that it was
nothing but a high rock.
This strip was separated from the shore of a small island by a long
narrow channel of water. Marsovino swam a few yards up the
channel, and then stopped to let Pinocchio jump on land.
“That battle in the sea has upset me greatly,” said Pinocchio to his
friend. “I must strengthen myself with some food. But I don’t see
anything around. What shall I eat?”
The last words were interrupted by a soft whistle from the channel. A
second whistle was heard, then a third, then a fourth. Our two friends
turned. Large, clumsy, black bodies were coming out of the water.
They were trying very hard to get to shore.
Pinocchio knew them at once. They were sea tortoises, and it was
they who had made those strange sounds. After dragging
themselves to the shore, they stood on the sand, moving their heads
and blinking up at the sun.
“You said you wanted something to eat, Pinocchio. Well, do you see
those large holes on the sand there? Look in them. You will surely
find some tortoise eggs in them. They will make a delicious dinner
for you.”
Pinocchio did not have to be told twice. In a moment he was gone. In
a short time he returned with two large eggs in his hands.
“Make haste, now, eat them. We must
continue our journey, and we have no
time to lose.”
“You are going to wait, my dear
Marsovino. I really do not see why you
should be in such a hurry.”
“Because father told me never to stop
needlessly. That’s why.”
“Yes, I know; but you shall wait now.
Since I have been with you I have eaten
nothing but raw fish. Fish and mollusks,
mollusks and fish, and I’m getting tired
of it. To-day I am going to eat boiled
eggs.”
“Boiled eggs! How, pray, and in what are
you going to boil them?”
“Ha, ha! That’s my secret. That day in the ship I found an iron box
with the word matches written on it. I kept it, but I never opened it.
Here it is.” And Pinocchio showed the dolphin a small black box
firmly closed.
“Now I’m going to use the matches. Do you want to see me build a
fire and cook my eggs?”
“Very well, have your own way. But make haste, you disobedient
boy.”
In no time Pinocchio had a good fire started.
“Now in what shall I put the water to boil?” he thought.
He looked around, and not very far away he saw a huge empty
tortoise shell.
“Marsovino!” he called. “Come here! Will you please blow on this fire
for me? I don’t want it to go out, and I want to get that tortoise shell
and some water.”
“But I can’t move out of the water,” answered Marsovino.
“Oh, yes, you can. Come! Drag yourself as near as possible to the
water. You amphibians can live out of the water for a while. So make
haste!”
“But Mr. Tursio told me never to leave the water.”
“Well, just for once.”
Marsovino finally gave in. There was no great harm in just one little
disobedience, he thought.
Pinocchio hastened away, and soon he was back with the shell full of
fresh water.
“Oh, how good that spring water was,” he said to his friend, who was
busily blowing the fire. “Now for a good dinner!”
The eggs were soon cooked, and Pinocchio certainly enjoyed them.
“I feel so well after that dinner I could travel to the end of the world,”
he said when he had finished.
The two travelers then turned toward the sea. But Marsovino gave a
cry of horror. In the channel hardly any water was left. The pebbly
bottom could be seen, and beyond that the steep rock.
“The tide!” cried Marsovino. “I forgot the tide! Poor me! I am lost!”
“What is the matter?”
“Don’t you see the water is gone? The tide has gone out, and now
how am I to get back to the sea? Before the tide comes in again I
shall be dead. Oh, oh, I shall never see dear father again.” And as
he talked poor Marsovino was beginning to breathe with difficulty,
and to suffer greatly.
Pinocchio understood little about tides, but he knew what Marsovino
meant by dying.
“And it is all my fault,” he cried, pulling at his hair. “If he dies, poor
me, what shall happen to me? I must find some way of saving him.”
Marsovino was now giving little sign of life. He lay on the sand, with
eyes closed, and breathing heavily.
With two bounds, Pinocchio was on top of the rocky ledge. Before
him was the sea.
“If only it were possible to break a hole in this rock,” he thought.
As if in answer, a strange object made its appearance in front of him.
It was a white spiral pole about two yards long. Behind the pole
Pinocchio saw a round gray head spotted with black. Against the
rocks the animal came with such force that they trembled. Suddenly
an idea struck our hero.
“Pardon me,” he called, “but will you allow me to speak with you a
moment?”
The immense animal, about six yards long, looked the boy over.
“What do you want, you small piece of humanity?” he asked proudly.
Pinocchio very humbly and very quickly told him the story of the poor
dolphin.
“And as it is my fault that he is in this condition, I want to try to save
him!” he exclaimed. “You seem so strong, will you please give this
rock a few knocks with that tooth of yours? I know you’ll be able to
break it.”
At this earnest supplication the narwhal, for that is what the animal
was, was highly pleased. He looked at Pinocchio in a tolerant way.
“First of all,” he answered, “before I do anything for you, let me ask
you a question.”
“Yes, sir, but please make haste, or Marsovino will die.”
“Do not interrupt me again, boy. First of all, what are you willing to
give me in return for this favor?”
“I have nothing, sir. I would give you anything I have—I wish I had
something—but I have nothing.”
“I do nothing for nothing. Good-by, then,” the narwhal replied. “But
answer me this. What have you in that box in your hands? That box