Nothing Is Simply One Thing: Conway on Multiplicity in Causation and Cognition

Abstract

Anne. Conway rejects More’s commitment to the simplicity thesis, breaking the connection between divisibility and immateriality that he strives so hard to maintain. All of creation, she argues against More’s modified Cartesianism, consists of spiritual particles, each of them potentially divisible ad infinitum, be they called “minds” or be they called “bodies.” While Rene Descartes’ philosophy takes its starting point in the cogito of the thinking self, Conway’s begins with a consideration of God’s nature, from whose attributes, she holds, ultimately all properties of the natural world can be deduced. According to an influential interpretation first proposed by Caroline Merchant, Conway’s metaphysics of created substance strikingly resembles G. W. Leibniz’s metaphysics of monads. Contrary to Leibniz, for Conway vitality is therefore closely linked to multiplicity, because only a complex being is able to extend itself and become more subtle through its parts.