If feminist research had not rediscovered this text, such an unusual philosopher as Anne Finch Conway would have been forgotten. She lived at the time when Descartes dominated philosophy with his division of body and soul. It is all the more astonishing that a woman, of all people, defied this thinking. For Anne Finch Conway, the body was not a machine, but a living organism that was as animated as the human being as a whole. In Living Matter, Anne Finch Conway's text Principles of the most ancient and modern philosophy is available for the first time in a German translation. A detailed biography rounds off the picture of this extraordinary thinker and her time.