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Marcy P. Lascano, The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway: Monism, Vitalism, and Self-Motion, Oxford University Press, 2023, 200pp., $98.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780197651636.
Reviewed by Jonathan L. Shaheen, Uppsala University
This welcome volume examines Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway, two mid-17th century British women philosophers who both developed interestingly non-mechanist metaphysical systems. Though Conway’s system is thoroughly theological in a way that Cavendish’s natural philosophy is explicitly not, their systems do share features like the subtitular monism, vitalism, and self-motion at a high level of description, and Marcy Lascano explores the extent to which these correspondences are informative at a more precise level. The volume is important for at least two main reasons. First, it presents what ought to be standard readings on several topics. Second, and I think more importantly, it sets out to do something that no other philosophy monograph has, to my knowledge, tried to do, and that is to let a…
