Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about Descartes and Elizabeth of Bohemia with Arianna Schneck,

who is just moving from the University of Bedefeld to the American University of Cairo.

So she'll probably be there by the time you hear this.

Hello, Ariana.

Hello.

Thanks so much for coming on the podcast to talk about these two exciting figures.

Let's start by reminding the listener what we've already been discussing in the last couple of episodes, which is that there's this correspondence between Elizabeth of Bohemia and Descartes.

How did they get into this exchange of ideas and how would you characterize the letters that we have that survived? Like, what's the tone? How much is there and so on?

Hi, thanks for having me here. I'm very excited to talk about Descartes and especially Elizabeth of

Bohemia. And how they got into the exchange was that Elizabeth was very well educated.

She was very much interested in philosophy, in mathematics, but also in other sciences.

And because of this interest, she read the meditations already early.

They were published in 1641.

And already in 1643, she initiated the exchange by writing the card a letter and asking questions

about what is now considered his main work, the Meditations on First Philosophy.

And the most famous part of this exchange is probably what is nowadays called the mind-body interaction problem.

So in her first letter, she asked the cardes a question about that, or several questions about

that.

But then they quickly came from discussing that problem to also discussing mathematical problems.

For example, Descartes sent her a geometrical problem for which he had found an algebraic

...