Elisabeth of the Palatinate

Elisabeth of the Palatinate (1618 to 1680), also called Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, was the eldest daughter of Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and Elizabeth Stuart, and is best known for her long correspondence with Rene Descartes. Those letters are the main surviving record of her own philosophical writing. In them she pressed Descartes on how two really distinct substances, mind and body, could interact causally and be united, and the exchange went on to the regulation of the passions, the nature of virtue and the greatest good, freedom of the will under divine causal determination and political philosophy. Descartes dedicated his Principles of Philosophy to her and wrote his Passions of the Soul at her request. She spent her later years as abbess of the convent at Herford.