[Revised entry by Lisa Shapiro on August 17, 2021.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Elisabeth, Princess Palatine of Bohemia (1618 – 1680) is most well-known for her extended correspondence with Rene Descartes, and indeed these letters constitute what we currently know of her extant philosophical writings. In that correspondence, Elisabeth presses Descartes on the relation between the two really distinct substances of mind and body, and in particular the possibility of their causal interaction and the nature of their union. They also correspond on Descartes’s physics, on the passions and their…