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Notes
1. Quotations from the Descartes–Elisabeth correspondence are from John J. Blom's translation of Descartes: His Moral Philosophy and Psychology ( Citation1978 ). For biographical information on Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, I am indebted to the excellent biography of her mother by Carola Oman (Citation1938). For additional biographical sources on Elisabeth, see Beatrice Zedler (Citation1989).
2. For a discussion of the philosophical merit of Elisabeth's specific objections to Descartes's treatment of mind–body interaction, see Daniel Garber (Citation1983).
3. When all Descartes's works are taken into account, however, there are good grounds (despite his reputation as a dualist) to see him as taking very seriously the ramifications of embodiment for human thinking. For such a reading, see Amélie Rorty's excellent ‘Descartes on Thinking with the Body’ (Citation1992).
4. Thomas Wartenberg (Citation1999) has explored, more fully than I can here, the bearing of the correspondence on issues of the gendered ‘contextualization’ of philosophy.
5. The ethical implications of Elisabeth's responses to Descartes, which I do not develop here, have been discussed by Andrea Nye (Citation1996).
6. Descartes (Citation1991), pp. 383–4.
7. A full evaluation of the philosophical importance of Elisabeth's responses to Descartes would, of course, need to address the relevance of the fact that she produced no philosophical treatise of her own. For an illuminating discussion of issues of genre in relation to the correspondence, see Lisa Shapiro (Citation1999).