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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]

I compare the notion of natural right in the work of François Poulain de la Barre and Gabrielle Suchon. Poulain defined right in terms of possession like Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke, but limited the equality it established between men and women to private spaces beyond the state's gaze. Suchon gave the natural right of freedom strong impetus by grounding it in Aristotelian teleology, but this framework made it a dead letter for the Enlightenment. This analysis demonstrates the importance of early modern feminist philosophy to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophy as well as to present-day discussions of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the determination by Cartesians to explain the maternal imagination's alleged role in the formation of birthmarks and the changing notion of monstrosity. Cartesians saw the formation of birthmarks as a challenge through which to demonstrate the heuristic capacity of mechanism. Descartes claimed to be able to explain the transmission of a perception from the mother's imagination to the fetus' skin without having recourse to the little pictures postulated by his contemporaries. La Forge offered a detailed account stating that the failure to explain the maternal imagination's impressions would cast doubt on mechanism. Whereas both characterized the birthmark as a deformation or monstrosity in miniature, Malebranche attributed a role to the maternal imagination in fashioning family likenesses. However, he also charged the mother's imagination with the transmission of original sin. [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.

Two editions of René Descartes's treatise on human physiology were published in the 1660s, more than a decade after his death: Florentius Schuyl's "Renatus Des Cartes de Homine" (1662) and Claude Clerselier's "L'Homme de René Descartes" (1664). The principal difference between them lies in the figures that illustrate the text. Schuyl's figures undermine Descartes's optimism; his anatomical sketches foreground human mortality while his landscapes remind the reader of the fleeting nature of time and the inevitability of death. In contrast, Clerselier's illustrations develop Descartes's comparison of the human body to a machine, which does not live nor, as a result, die. They thus obscure the fate of the author's dead body and in turn pave the way for the resurrection of his "esprit." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the four essays in this issue including one which shows a pattern of acknowledge collaboration between anatomists and mathematicians, and an article which brings to light the theoretical frameworks that informed William Harvey's and Nathaniel Highmore's differing interpretations of their shared experiments with and observation of chick dogs.