Right out of the gate, Conway goes after Spinoza. In paragraph three, she completely denounces Spinoza’s notion that there is only one substance, and that substance is God. Instead, she suggests that God and his creations are different substances. I can easily imagine how this must have been a comfortable move back to a more traditional division between the divine and human. Spinoza’s radical departure from tradition probably did not make him many friends in the religious philosophical community. I wonder how much of Conway is an attempt at restoring older theories, and how much is innovative in its own way.
In the early chapters, Conway appears to go further back than I anticipated and really wrestles with many of the problems addressed by medieval philosophers. Chapter 2 explores the seemingly incomprehensible and necessary idea that God exists logically prior to time, but not temporally prior. Chapters 3 and 4 examines God’s freedom and its apparent limitations when pressed against his necessarily all-good character, while grappling with the idea that what is Good logically must be either determined by God, which might make it arbitrary, or that God might like something because it is good (logically) prior to Him. In chapter five, Conway addresses change with the same thorough discipline that Aristotle does, as well as many other Ancients. I get the idea that calling Conway a Neo-Platonist might be underselling just how much she adheres to those theories. I look forward to seeing her attempts to solve some of the more sophisticated criticism of that school of thought.
I find it interesting how Conway says, "...But he is not separated or cut off from them—on the contrary he is closely and intimately and intensely present in everything," and yet she still distinguishes God as one substance and his creatures as other substances. So despite being different substances, God still has omnipresence.
I also found this part to be very intriguing: "God was not indifferent about whether or not to bring creatures into existence, and that he made them from an inner impulse of his divine goodness and wisdom. So he created worlds—i.e. created creatures—as promptly as he could, because it’s the nature of a necessary agent to do as much as he can." It's clear that Conway puts a lot of faith in God's benevolence and "divine goodness". She also says "as promptly as he could." I wonder if this implies that God has a limit to his production? He's only creating things as fast as he could, after all.
1. Conway’s idea about hard bodies having spirits is weird yet interesting. Especially because she believes that not only human beings, animals and plants possess spirits, but also metals and precious stones. Moreover, I found interesting that she believes there are two kind of spirits: the ones that are united to the bodies and cannot come out of them, and the ones that are finely divided and cannot stay inside a body. 2. Since the beginning it was clear that she was criticizing the philosophies of Spinoza and Descartes, as she mentions that the philosophers that believe in a monist nature, and the ones that separate God from the creatures were wrong. She presents a new perspective, explaining that there are three types of substances or essences: God, Christ, and creatures. Her point of view seems to me very Christian-based (religious), as she mentions the old and new testament, and continues arguments with lines from the bible such as “Their angels look upon the face of my heavenly father” (Matthew 18:10), which I personally did not like because I understand that people try to use religion to find an answer to their doubts, but I do not think that is the best idea. So some parts of her arguments made sense to me, but some other not too much because the foundation of those ideas were not valid for me.
1) In chapter 6 on page 21, Conway highlights the idea of some sort of law of justice in the realm of creatures. I thought it was interesting to bring up because the word justice seems like a subjective term. Conway describes it as a divine force though, where God serves each creature what it deserves according to how it acts. Men can be rewarded by being promoted in rank to that of the angels, be punished by being sentenced to hell, or have a middle ground where after their human life they become a 'brutish' animal. This all depends on how they treated the beings below them and the laws they live by during their life. 2) I also thought it was interesting how Conway differed in her argument of the body and spirit from the other philosophers we have been reading. She argues on page 42 in chapter 8 that 'body is nothing but fixed and condensed spirit, and spirit nothing but finely divided or volatile body.' I thought that this was an interesting concept, but could not fully grasp the following concept that there are multiple spirits in a given body and that some of them are so small and divided that they actually can and do come out of the bodies. I had trouble figuring out how this applies to her argument and what degree of relevancy it holds.
1. Viscountess Conway makes some radical claims in Chapter 6. It seems as though she is placing a tremendous limit on creatures ability to reason or to know of things for certainty. For example, on page 15, she lists some of these limitations. She says we can't be certain of anything, we can't have true knowledge or understanding of anything, all our innate ideas are false, and lastly, anything inferred from those idea are also false. Conway then attributes these limitations to creatures because of our impermanence. Saying that we are of a different substance of God, and in doing so, as someone has already pointed out, is directly contradicting Spinoza.
2. I was also confused as to where Conway finds the knowledge to ground these claims in. Because if, as she noted, our knowledge of things is so severely limited, wouldn't this very limitation inhibit her from asserting these claims on a basis of fact?
1.) In Chapter 6, I found it interesting how Conway stated that there are three species. God is the first species, Christ is the second which acts as the perfect medium between humans and God, and the third are creatures. Also, I enjoyed how Conway described the potentiality of creatures reaching excellence. She states that creatures have the endless capability of greater perfection but cannot and will never reach God’s level of the highest excellence. This means that although creatures are finite, they have the infinite ability to become better beings.
2.) In Chapter 8, Conway argues that the soul and body are of one substance relying on each other for life and motion. This rejects the Cartesian philosophy which states that the body is nothing but a dead substance lacking any life. She states a hard body holds the spirit captive and releases the soul when the body becomes soft which might be describing what happens during death. Also, I enjoyed her perception of sin in which Conway says that it occurs when we misuse our God given power of motion by being in the wrong place.
1. One question I have is when it comes to the species - I think this concept is really interesting. My question is this is only the physical of humanity. What about our soul? Because that part would be more closely linked to God is our soul concidered infinite? 2. In the 8th chapter when she is talking about finely divided spirit I feel like she is referring to our senses. I liked this part though because she seems to say that the smaller and finer a thing is the better and that all important things are small. That the natural property of motion is to make things smaller. It makes me think because if you break stuff down to a molecular level you can see her ideas that we are all species. It all comes down to Carbon!
1.) While I found several interesting insights within the piece, and other things that stirred by imagination I found the piece to be much to platonic for me. I don't know if she is explicitly a Platonist but I am getting strong idealistic overtones here. Dispute this, I got a lot out of this piece, specifically the idea that "the capacity to improve is infinite but it never reaches this infinity". Ignoring the context for a moment, the idea can be applied to the dialectical process of human history itself. Where the species has infinite ability to improve itself, to change its nature over time, however the dialectical process has no end and will never be a teleology as such. 2.) I had a similar appropriation of her Ideas when she discusses the possibility of humans through their acts to ascend and become angels in their next life. While my particular brand of materialism finds the entire proposition observed, I do find that an interesting analogy can be made with regard to artificial intelligence. That perhaps if the human dialectic of history endures in the direction of progress we may one day give birth to a new kind of consciousness, we may even slowly transform into another form of consciousness over time, and so on and so on. What I like is here above all else the notion of progress without teleology.
1. I find Conway's belief that not only human beings possess spirits, but animals, plants, even metals and stones very interesting. When she talks about spirits and the two types I just am not sure how you would categorize objects and people in those two categories. 2. It was interesting to see Conway really rebutting Spinoza, and denying the claim "there is only one substance and that is God." In chapter 6 Conway makes claims that are very interesting yet seem like there are no grounds to what she has to say.
1)I always have to chuckle when someone attributes all-powerfulness to God. Simply because it brings a certain objection to mind. If god is all-powerful then God can create a soup so hot that not even God can drink it, thus God is not all-powerful. This I think cuts to the heart of why many of these ‘infinte’ attributes fail logically because they have no correspondence with reality and are nothing more than negation of their finite counterparts. 2)Could something unchanging like God even produce something that can change. If God is perfect and unchanging then how could God create something that does change. Doesn't this thought process posit that mutability as some sign of imperfection. How could an unchanging and perfect God instill a changing and imperfect quality in things? If it is because we have free will then wouldn't that mean that God changes when he gains new knowledge after we act on our free will?
1. A passage in which I found of interest in this reading was the opening of chapter two when Conway writes, "All creatures are or exist simply because God wants them to: his will is infinitely powerful, and his mere command can give existence to creatures without having any help, using any means to the end of creation, or having any material to work on." (Conway 3) I really like this quote because I too believe God contains to the power to create to whatever he imagines with no help. Conway believes that there are more than one substance, but God is the most powerful one; thus, he does not need the help of any other substance. I don't know if would agree that there are more than one substances,but I would agree that God is more powerful than humans. 2. Another passage that sparked my interest in this reading was when Conway writes, "Why is the infinity of time different from God’s eternity?" (Conway 4) She mentions later that time is nothing and although I can't decide whether I agree with that are not, this question and statement about time really got me to stop and wonder myself about the nature of time. I can't seem to wrap my mind around the meaning of eternity. How long can things possibly go on for?
1) The first thing I found interesting about the reading is the difference between the infinity of time and God's eternity. Conway explains time as "nothing but successive motion or operation of creatures; if they stopped moving or operating time would come to an end..." Unlike time, there is no successive movement in god. He is perfect, he does not need to make progress. This is a new concept to me, I'm used to the idea that no matter what happens, time will keep on going. But Conway tells me something different. 2)I am a little confused when it comes to the discussion of free will and creating life. In the beginning of chapter 3, it says that "God's will is indeed utterly free: just because he is free and acts spontaneously in whatever he does, anything he does in regard to his creatures is done without an external force or compulsion and without any casual input from the creatures." But then later down in paragraph 3 the author writes "God was not indifferent about whether or not to bring creatures into existence, and that he made them from inner impulse of his divine goodness and wisdom." If God is free to do what he wants with no advise from anything else, why did he have to make creatures?
1. Reading Conway was very interesting. In Chapter One Conway begins with, "There are in God no dark parts, no hints of anything to do with bodies, and therefore nothing - nothing - in the way of form or image". To me, she describes God as this pure being that will not do anything wrong.
2. In the beginning Chapter 2nd, Conway talks about God's creatures and the reason why they exist because God wants them. Conway states "His will is infinitely powerful, and his mere command can give existence to creatures without having any help, using any means to the end of creation, or having any material to work on". Here is seems she is talking from a religious standpoint.
1. Not going to lie, I found Conway one of the more entertaining reads: radical and oddly optimistic. As far as her theory that all things contain some trace of consciousness, it could be that inanimate objects possess only a sliver of unidentifiable sentience that leaves little room for their soul or spirit to grow.
2. The one problem I found, however, was her strict hierarchy that seems to directly differ from the Platonic forms. To what extent is God's goodness demonstrated if we know for sure that the soul of a plant will never elevate to that of an animal or a human? Or perhaps rather that this theory does nothing but uphold the view that humans are exceptional in this position, because let's be honest, the only creatures moving up are humans.
Right out of the gate, Conway goes after Spinoza. In paragraph three, she completely denounces Spinoza’s notion that there is only one substance, and that substance is God. Instead, she suggests that God and his creations are different substances. I can easily imagine how this must have been a comfortable move back to a more traditional division between the divine and human. Spinoza’s radical departure from tradition probably did not make him many friends in the religious philosophical community. I wonder how much of Conway is an attempt at restoring older theories, and how much is innovative in its own way.
ReplyDeleteIn the early chapters, Conway appears to go further back than I anticipated and really wrestles with many of the problems addressed by medieval philosophers. Chapter 2 explores the seemingly incomprehensible and necessary idea that God exists logically prior to time, but not temporally prior. Chapters 3 and 4 examines God’s freedom and its apparent limitations when pressed against his necessarily all-good character, while grappling with the idea that what is Good logically must be either determined by God, which might make it arbitrary, or that God might like something because it is good (logically) prior to Him. In chapter five, Conway addresses change with the same thorough discipline that Aristotle does, as well as many other Ancients. I get the idea that calling Conway a Neo-Platonist might be underselling just how much she adheres to those theories. I look forward to seeing her attempts to solve some of the more sophisticated criticism of that school of thought.
I find it interesting how Conway says, "...But he is not separated or cut off from them—on the contrary he is closely and intimately and
ReplyDeleteintensely present in everything," and yet she still distinguishes God as one substance and his creatures as other substances. So despite being different substances, God still has omnipresence.
I also found this part to be very intriguing: "God was not indifferent about whether or not to bring creatures into existence, and that he made them from an inner impulse of his divine goodness
and wisdom. So he created worlds—i.e. created creatures—as promptly as he could, because it’s the nature of a necessary agent to do as much as he can." It's clear that Conway puts a lot of faith in God's benevolence and "divine goodness". She also says "as promptly as he could." I wonder if this implies that God has a limit to his production? He's only creating things as fast as he could, after all.
1. Conway’s idea about hard bodies having spirits is weird yet interesting. Especially because she believes that not only human beings, animals and plants possess spirits, but also metals and precious stones. Moreover, I found interesting that she believes there are two kind of spirits: the ones that are united to the bodies and cannot come out of them, and the ones that are finely divided and cannot stay inside a body.
ReplyDelete2. Since the beginning it was clear that she was criticizing the philosophies of Spinoza and Descartes, as she mentions that the philosophers that believe in a monist nature, and the ones that separate God from the creatures were wrong. She presents a new perspective, explaining that there are three types of substances or essences: God, Christ, and creatures. Her point of view seems to me very Christian-based (religious), as she mentions the old and new testament, and continues arguments with lines from the bible such as “Their angels look upon the face of my heavenly father” (Matthew 18:10), which I personally did not like because I understand that people try to use religion to find an answer to their doubts, but I do not think that is the best idea. So some parts of her arguments made sense to me, but some other not too much because the foundation of those ideas were not valid for me.
1) In chapter 6 on page 21, Conway highlights the idea of some sort of law of justice in the realm of creatures. I thought it was interesting to bring up because the word justice seems like a subjective term. Conway describes it as a divine force though, where God serves each creature what it deserves according to how it acts. Men can be rewarded by being promoted in rank to that of the angels, be punished by being sentenced to hell, or have a middle ground where after their human life they become a 'brutish' animal. This all depends on how they treated the beings below them and the laws they live by during their life.
ReplyDelete2) I also thought it was interesting how Conway differed in her argument of the body and spirit from the other philosophers we have been reading. She argues on page 42 in chapter 8 that 'body is nothing but fixed and condensed spirit, and spirit nothing but finely divided or volatile body.' I thought that this was an interesting concept, but could not fully grasp the following concept that there are multiple spirits in a given body and that some of them are so small and divided that they actually can and do come out of the bodies. I had trouble figuring out how this applies to her argument and what degree of relevancy it holds.
1. Viscountess Conway makes some radical claims in Chapter 6. It seems as though she is placing a tremendous limit on creatures ability to reason or to know of things for certainty. For example, on page 15, she lists some of these limitations. She says we can't be certain of anything, we can't have true knowledge or understanding of anything, all our innate ideas are false, and lastly, anything inferred from those idea are also false. Conway then attributes these limitations to creatures because of our impermanence. Saying that we are of a different substance of God, and in doing so, as someone has already pointed out, is directly contradicting Spinoza.
ReplyDelete2. I was also confused as to where Conway finds the knowledge to ground these claims in. Because if, as she noted, our knowledge of things is so severely limited, wouldn't this very limitation inhibit her from asserting these claims on a basis of fact?
1.) In Chapter 6, I found it interesting how Conway stated that there are three species. God is the first species, Christ is the second which acts as the perfect medium between humans and God, and the third are creatures. Also, I enjoyed how Conway described the potentiality of creatures reaching excellence. She states that creatures have the endless capability of greater perfection but cannot and will never reach God’s level of the highest excellence. This means that although creatures are finite, they have the infinite ability to become better beings.
ReplyDelete2.) In Chapter 8, Conway argues that the soul and body are of one substance relying on each other for life and motion. This rejects the Cartesian philosophy which states that the body is nothing but a dead substance lacking any life. She states a hard body holds the spirit captive and releases the soul when the body becomes soft which might be describing what happens during death. Also, I enjoyed her perception of sin in which Conway says that it occurs when we misuse our God given power of motion by being in the wrong place.
1. One question I have is when it comes to the species - I think this concept is really interesting. My question is this is only the physical of humanity. What about our soul? Because that part would be more closely linked to God is our soul concidered infinite?
ReplyDelete2. In the 8th chapter when she is talking about finely divided spirit I feel like she is referring to our senses. I liked this part though because she seems to say that the smaller and finer a thing is the better and that all important things are small. That the natural property of motion is to make things smaller. It makes me think because if you break stuff down to a molecular level you can see her ideas that we are all species. It all comes down to Carbon!
1.) While I found several interesting insights within the piece, and other things that stirred by imagination I found the piece to be much to platonic for me. I don't know if she is explicitly a Platonist but I am getting strong idealistic overtones here. Dispute this, I got a lot out of this piece, specifically the idea that "the capacity to improve is infinite but it never reaches this infinity". Ignoring the context for a moment, the idea can be applied to the dialectical process of human history itself. Where the species has infinite ability to improve itself, to change its nature over time, however the dialectical process has no end and will never be a teleology as such.
ReplyDelete2.) I had a similar appropriation of her Ideas when she discusses the possibility of humans through their acts to ascend and become angels in their next life. While my particular brand of materialism finds the entire proposition observed, I do find that an interesting analogy can be made with regard to artificial intelligence. That perhaps if the human dialectic of history endures in the direction of progress we may one day give birth to a new kind of consciousness, we may even slowly transform into another form of consciousness over time, and so on and so on. What I like is here above all else the notion of progress without teleology.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete1. I find Conway's belief that not only human beings possess spirits, but animals, plants, even metals and stones very interesting. When she talks about spirits and the two types I just am not sure how you would categorize objects and people in those two categories.
ReplyDelete2. It was interesting to see Conway really rebutting Spinoza, and denying the claim "there is only one substance and that is God." In chapter 6 Conway makes claims that are very interesting yet seem like there are no grounds to what she has to say.
1)I always have to chuckle when someone attributes all-powerfulness to God. Simply because it brings a certain objection to mind. If god is all-powerful then God can create a soup so hot that not even God can drink it, thus God is not all-powerful. This I think cuts to the heart of why many of these ‘infinte’ attributes fail logically because they have no correspondence with reality and are nothing more than negation of their finite counterparts.
ReplyDelete2)Could something unchanging like God even produce something that can change. If God is perfect and unchanging then how could God create something that does change. Doesn't this thought process posit that mutability as some sign of imperfection. How could an unchanging and perfect God instill a changing and imperfect quality in things? If it is because we have free will then wouldn't that mean that God changes when he gains new knowledge after we act on our free will?
1. A passage in which I found of interest in this reading was the opening of chapter two when Conway writes, "All creatures are or exist simply because God wants them to: his will is infinitely powerful, and his mere command can give existence to creatures without having any help, using any means to the end of creation, or having any material to work on." (Conway 3) I really like this quote because I too believe God contains to the power to create to whatever he imagines with no help. Conway believes that there are more than one substance, but God is the most powerful one; thus, he does not need the help of any other substance. I don't know if would agree that there are more than one substances,but I would agree that God is more powerful than humans.
ReplyDelete2. Another passage that sparked my interest in this reading was when Conway writes, "Why is the infinity of time different from God’s eternity?" (Conway 4) She mentions later that time is nothing and although I can't decide whether I agree with that are not, this question and statement about time really got me to stop and wonder myself about the nature of time. I can't seem to wrap my mind around the meaning of eternity. How long can things possibly go on for?
1) The first thing I found interesting about the reading is the difference between the infinity of time and God's eternity. Conway explains time as "nothing but successive motion or operation of creatures; if they stopped moving or operating time would come to an end..." Unlike time, there is no successive movement in god. He is perfect, he does not need to make progress. This is a new concept to me, I'm used to the idea that no matter what happens, time will keep on going. But Conway tells me something different.
ReplyDelete2)I am a little confused when it comes to the discussion of free will and creating life. In the beginning of chapter 3, it says that "God's will is indeed utterly free: just because he is free and acts spontaneously in whatever he does, anything he does in regard to his creatures is done without an external force or compulsion and without any casual input from the creatures." But then later down in paragraph 3 the author writes "God was not indifferent about whether or not to bring creatures into existence, and that he made them from inner impulse of his divine goodness and wisdom." If God is free to do what he wants with no advise from anything else, why did he have to make creatures?
1. Reading Conway was very interesting. In Chapter One Conway begins with, "There are in God no dark parts, no hints of anything to do with bodies, and therefore nothing - nothing - in the way of form or image". To me, she describes God as this pure being that will not do anything wrong.
ReplyDelete2. In the beginning Chapter 2nd, Conway talks about God's creatures and the reason why they exist because God wants them. Conway states "His will is infinitely powerful, and his mere command can give existence to creatures without having any help, using any means to the end of creation, or having any material to work on". Here is seems she is talking from a religious standpoint.
1. Not going to lie, I found Conway one of the more entertaining reads: radical and oddly optimistic. As far as her theory that all things contain some trace of consciousness, it could be that inanimate objects possess only a sliver of unidentifiable sentience that leaves little room for their soul or spirit to grow.
ReplyDelete2. The one problem I found, however, was her strict hierarchy that seems to directly differ from the Platonic forms. To what extent is God's goodness demonstrated if we know for sure that the soul of a plant will never elevate to that of an animal or a human? Or perhaps rather that this theory does nothing but uphold the view that humans are exceptional in this position, because let's be honest, the only creatures moving up are humans.