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  • The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes
  • Seth Bordner and Alan Nelson
Lisa Shapiro, editor and translator. The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xxviii + 246. Paper, $25.00.

Descartes’s correspondence with Elisabeth is among the most important we have for understanding the philosophical thought of a canonical figure. Elisabeth’s perspicacious queries drew forth Descartes’s very famous elaboration of mind/body union. The correspondence also contains the bulk of Descartes’s important statements on morality—a topic touched [End Page 642] on only briefly in his books. It seems likely that this part of the correspondence helped set Descartes on the course that resulted in his last book, The Passions of the Soul. Moreover, Elisabeth’s letters to Descartes are her only extant philosophical writings. In Lisa Shapiro’s volume we have, for the first time, translations of the thirty-three (the cover blurb says thirty-two) letters of Descartes and the twenty-six of Elisabeth complete and unabridged. This is, therefore, a very welcome addition to existing English editions of Descartes’s works and an important resource for studying early modern philosophy written by women.

The volume’s focus is, quite appropriately, on Elisabeth (Shapiro does not anglicize the spelling of her name). It appears in the University of Chicago Press’s series entitled “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.” This means that it is graced (or encumbered, depending on the reader’s disposition) with a twenty-page introduction by the series editors, M. King and A. Rabil, Jr. This is a history of negative attitudes toward women in Western culture from 500 BC to 1700. It might be an eye-opener for undergraduates; those with a complacent attitude, however, might have it inadvertently reinforced by the authors’ assessment that, “In western Europe and the United States, women are nearing equality in the professions, in business, and in politics” (ix). A “series editors’ bibliography” of another twenty pages is also provided. It is fortunate that Shapiro herself produced another introduction and bibliography specific to the correspondence. The “volume editor’s” Introduction begins with succinct accounts of the circumstances of the writing of the letters and of the lives of both correspondents. There is a useful topical introduction to the philosophical themes that are discussed; Shapiro’s stance is mostly neutral on contested interpretive issues. This section will be appreciated by students in philosophy and by scholars in other disciplines.

The Introduction concludes with a very interesting analysis of Elisabeth’s philosophical commitments. Shapiro argues convincingly that, “Her remarks to Descartes, including objections to his own positions, are internally consistent” (4). Prominent among Elisabeth’s commitments is the requirement that natural phenomena receive mechanistic explanations. This commitment is so strong that it inclines her to a materialist ontology of mind (41). It is hard to see that inclination as consistent with a counter-commitment to the autonomy of the mind from the body. Shapiro works to conclude that “this autonomy of the mind is in a very important way dependent on the condition of the body” (43). Another commitment of Elisabeth’s is to a virtue ethics that is traditional enough to have her resist Descartes’s extreme reduction of virtue to the steadfastness of the will. Sometimes Shapiro uses the phrase ‘philosophical position’ to refer to these commitments of Elisabeth’s. This might seem to suggest something like a developed doctrine backed by specific arguments instead of commitment to a general philosophical background. We can, in this way, explain why in some places we read things like: “we gain a clear sense of her philosophical commitments” (4), while in others we read that a consideration of Elisabeth’s philosophical position “is unavoidably speculative” (36). It is Elisabeth’s intellectual background that Shapiro makes clear and the specific doctrines (if any) that Elisabeth would state in her own voice that must remain a matter of speculation.

The translations themselves are accurate and hew closely to the French syntax. The familiar translations of Descartes’s letters in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III (Cambridge...

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