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The article discusses two books related to historical figures. The first book, "Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680): A Philosopher in her Historical Context," is a collection of essays that explore the life and philosophy of Elisabeth of Bohemia. The essays cover various aspects of her life, including her education, scientific inquiry, friendship with Anne Conway, and political thought. The book provides valuable insights into Elisabeth's contributions and is a valuable resource for researchers interested in her work. The second book is a review of a biography of René Descartes titled "La Vie de Monsieur Descartes" by Adrien Baillet. The biography, published in 1691, is an important contemporary source for understanding Descartes's life. The reviewer praises Annie Bitbol-Hespériès's edition of the biography, which includes annotations and detailed notes, and highlights her previous work on Descartes's writings. [Extracted from the article]

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The article examines how the reputation and philosophy of Rene Descartes survived deriding by his opponents after his death. Through posthumous publication and dissemination of Descartes' previously unpublished materials, his supporters linked the belief in life after death to the endurance of his spirit via his works.

I trace key arguments of Jean–Jacques Rousseau's political philosophy to Louise Dupin's Ouvrage sur les femmes to reveal that early modern feminist thought contributed directly to social contract theory. Rousseau applied Dupin's mockery of the marriage contract to dismiss as fraudulent the political contract that previous natural law philosophers had imagined between subjects and sovereign. He then made mutually exclusive property the foundation of the republican social contract, just as Dupin had stipulated separately owned property as the condition of equality in marriage. Yet Rousseau rejected the feminist content of Dupin's arguments, despite incorporating her strategies. Paradoxically, while Dupin, a monarchist, construed marriage along the egalitarian lines of a friendship based on 'la douceur du commerce', the republican Rousseau invested men with the douceur of the absolute sovereign, masking the contractual character of marriage by positing women's subordination to men as a matter of passionate attachment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses René Descartes's concept of individualism. Descartes, accordingly, argued that thought is the essence of the ego. With this idea, it allegedly reflects Descartes' belief that neither the body nor relations with others do constitute a person in any significant way. From this point, the idea has been elevated to include the so-called symbolic fetus in order to uphold his newly-founded belief that personhood is conceived without regard to embodiment or sociability. Many feminists, however, have found themselves dissenting Descartes' idea that in a living person, mind and body form a single substance.