The origins of the modern emotions: Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and the embodied mind

History of European Ideas 43 (6):547-559 (2017)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In the history of European ideas, Princess Elisabeth is conventionally viewed as little more than a curiosity, a clever but ultimately unimportant exiled princess who became the confidant, critic, and muse of a far more famous man, René Descartes. Contrary to this view, however, this article argues that Elisabeth made a significant contribution to the development of western philosophy in her own right. Drawing on her letters to Descartes, as well the diaries and correspondence of her associates and a range of secondary sources, it demonstrates that an early understanding of the modern emotions akin to that which later found form in the work of the moral sentiment theorists can be found in Elisabeth’s thought. In particular, drawing on her understanding of the embodied mind, Elisabeth of Bohemia began to develop a hybrid understanding of the passions, identified a role for the emotions in the pursuit of virtue, and began to reconceive the relationship between reason and the emotions that had until then dominated seventeenth-century thought.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 84,361

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia.Lisa Shapiro - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The Three Princesses.Beatrice H. Zedler - 1989 - Hypatia 4 (1):28 - 63.
Embodiment, emotion, and cognition.Michelle Maiese - 2010 - New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Social origins of cognition: Bartlett, evolutionary perspective and embodied mind approach.Akiko Saito - 1996 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 26 (4):399–421.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-10-25

Downloads
56 (#232,924)

6 months
4 (#201,141)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations