Book announcement | Former Scholar in Residence at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism Karen Felter Vaucanson has successfully defended her thesis on the Cambridge Platonist, Anne Conway, at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany.
Former Scholar in Residence at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism Karen Felter Vaucanson has graduated with honors, defending a thesis on the Cambridge Platonist, Anne Conway, at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany.
Dr. Felter Vaucanson uses modern process theology as a hermeneutical lens to identify overlaps between Anne Conway’s philosophy and modern process theology and to analyze how and to what extent Conway’s philosophy can be viewed as a precursor to process theology. This novel approach allows the author to argue that Conway’s treatise The Philosophy of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy contains a struggle between two strongly influential ontological paradigms that have existed throughout the history of philosophy – a static ontology of being and a transformative ontology of becoming. This struggle comes to the fore in what the author argues are the two main themes of Conway’s treatise: the relation between God and the world, and the relation between spirit and body.
While the thesis uses Conway’s treatise as a fulcrum it also offers comparative studies of the specific philosophical and theological positions found in Platonism, Origenism, and process theology. Thus, Dr. Felter Vaucanson offers detailed analyses of concrete texts and positions while combining these with general perspectives on philosophy and theology in an attempt to clarify the relevance of Anne Conway’s Principles for theology today. The work will be published shortly by Aschendorff Verlag in the series Adamantiana under the title A Complex Relation. Reading Anne Conway from a Process Theological Perspective.
The work of thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Dr. Alfons Fürst and was part of the Innovative Training Network The History of Human Freedom and Dignity in Western Civilization led by Prof. Dr. Habil. Anders-Christian Jacobsen of Aarhus University and funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 676258.