Psyche and soma: physicians and metaphysicians on the mind-body problem from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

As the introduction to this book states: "Few subjects have stimulated a more intensive intellectual interchange than the nature of the human soul and its relationship to the body" (p. 3). All thirteen chapters are published here for the first time. The first four examine the developing conceptualization of the soul and its relationship to the body as perceived by the Greeks. Much here is familiar but well presented. In the Hippocratic Corpus, as Beate Gundert notes, "the psychic is interpreted in terms of the body, its structures, and its processes, or not at all" (p. 35). However, as Tom Robinson remarks, in Plato we have "the first fully articulated account of the relationship between soul (psyche) and body (s6ma)" (p. 37). Robinson summarizes how Plato dealt with the problem of "relating a physical substance to its immaterial one, and to the end he openly admits his bafflement" (p. 55). That bafflement would echo down the ages. Philip van der Eijk examines Aristotle's handling of dualism, concluding that Aristotle might have posited the concept of nous to avoid "the apparently mechanistic and deterministic implications of this bio-medical approach to the soul" (p. 75). Heinrich von Staden summarizes Hellenistic theories of the soul and body, stressing the revolutionary impact of the anatomical and physiological advances of Herophilus and Erasistratus on Stoicism as well as Galen's debt. Theo Heckel cogently presents how St Paul tried to convince Platonizing Corinthians that the body is not merely a passive receptacle for the soul. Gareth Matthews examines Augustine's use of "for the first time, an argument for dualism that is essentially intemalist" (p. 134). Renaissance theories are discussed by Emily Michael, where the discussion shifted to the question of the soul's immortality (p. 156), and the elaboration and separation of the extended, corporeal soul and the incorporeal, immortal mind (pp. 164-5). As Stephen Voss notes in chapter 8, whilst for Aristotelians the study of the soul was part of the "science of nature", Descartes' groundbreaking step was to exclude the soul from the scope of physical enquiry (p. 176). The remaining five chapters deal with this Cartesian legacy. Thomas Lennon discusses how Pierre Bayle recorded and annotated the debate among materialists, Cartesians, and Leibnizian monadology. Francois Duchesneau examines the animism of Georg Stahl and his polemic with Leibniz. John Wright discusses two types of dualism in eighteenth-century medicine: "substance dualism", which held that body and soul consisted of different and incompatible substances, and "function dualism", which assigned thought functions to the soul (mind) and life functions to the body. These two groups were closer than they maintained. Roselyne Rey looks at vitalism in the second half of the eighteenth century. Instead of examining the ontological status of the soul, vitalists stated that the essential property of living matter was sensibility