Nature always works toward the Greater Perfection of Subtlety and Spirituality: Natural Justice and Hierarchy of Beings in Anne Conway

NATALIA STROK

Congreso; Princeton-Bucharest Seminar; 2020

In this talk I would like to explore the concept of natural justice that Conway addresses in her Principia Philosophiae. I want to show that, although everything is reunited in one essence in the third kind of substance in her metaphysics, there is a distinction between nature, in general, and human nature, in particular. She presents a hierarchy of beings that has human nature as the principal one, and a framework of transmutations, that tends toward good, in spite of the possibility of going toward bad. I will pay attention to the mechanism of transmutations that Conway presents and the punishments to the sinful nature, as divine justice.