- Lived:
- 1618–1680 · Heidelberg, The Hague, Berlin, Herford — a life mapped by exile
- Tradition:
- Early modern rationalism — as its sharpest inside critic
- The Big Idea:
- If mind and body are utterly different kinds of thing, as Descartes claimed, then there is no intelligible way for one to move the other — and a philosophy that cannot explain how you raise your own arm has a hole in its foundation.
- In their words:
- "How can the soul of a human being determine the spirits of the body so as to produce voluntary actions — being, as it is, only a thinking substance?"
- If you remember one thing:
- She published nothing, held no post, and wrote only letters — and with one polite question she set the agenda for the next century of philosophy of mind. Every great system that followed is, in part, an attempt to answer Elisabeth.