When we think of contemporary philosophy of mind, we might be inclined to think of something fairly cutting edge, engaging with the latest developments in neuroscience or developing new frameworks for thinking about consciousness. It's up-to-the-minute exciting stuff. Is there anything to be gained from going back to revisit ancient arguments about the mind? As the title of this volume makes clear, ancient debates were primarily focused on the soul rather than the mind, a term that might in itself put off some readers given some of its connotations. That would be a great shame because, as this volume superbly illustrates, there was much going on in ancient debates about the body and soul that resonates with questions still debated today.

This collection of essays derives from a meeting of the triennial Symposium Hellenisticum. The contributions are all by specialists and aimed at specialists. The volume takes the label ‘Hellenistic’ broadly to cover not only the Hellenistic period proper (roughly the third to first centuries BC) but also later developments up to the second century AD.

The Hellenistic period saw the rise of the Stoic and Epicurean schools of philosophy, both resolutely materialist. Multiple chapters engage with the challenges of trying to give a purely materialist or physicalist account of the soul. In this context, ‘soul’ simply means that by virtue of which an organism is alive. This was a question of intense interest to medical practitioners too and a number of chapters offer fruitful and informative accounts of the interaction between philosophy and medicine in this period. The opening chapter by Sylvia Berryman examines the way in which Aristotelians such as Strato adapted and developed Aristotle's account of the soul in the light of the latest scientific evidence, such as the discovery of the nerves. Although Strato might appear to be a heterodox Aristotelian, in fact his attention to the latest empirical discoveries shows that he was true to the spirit of Aristotle, who himself commented that when new evidence appears theories ought to be amended. This is followed by David Leith's contribution, which also considers the impact of scientific and medical developments on Strato and the Stoic Chrysippus. He comments that while doctors of the period made a number of important discoveries potentially relevant to the study of the soul, they were not so interested in giving an account of the soul themselves (p. 48). That work was left to the philosophers.

The next chapter, by Philip van der Eijk, turns to a much later figure who was both a doctor and a philosopher: Galen. It focuses on Galen's attempts to explain psycho-physical interaction and examines in particular an apparent tension in his work between i) a commitment to material determinism and ii) the idea that the soul uses the body as an instrument, which van der Eijk calls ‘teleological instrumentalism’ (p. 65). The way through this, van der Eijk argues, is to stress that the material constituents of our bodies can be modified through changes in lifestyle, exercise, or diet, which can in turn impact on the state of our souls (p. 88). Rather than either the soul using the body as a mere tool or the soul being a passive observer of processes determined by the body, instead there is a complex feedback loop involving both.

Francesco Verde's chapter on Epicureanism also touches on the relationship between philosophy and medicine, drawing on among other things papyrological evidence for the Epicurean philosopher Demetrius Lacon. One far from superseded question that raises its head here is how a purely materialist account of the mind or soul can account for the development of sentience (p. 93). The focus of the discussion, however, is about divisions within the soul between rational and non-rational parts in the Epicurean tradition.

The next two chapters turn to the Stoics. Francesco Ademollo examines the relationship between the soul of the individual and the soul of the cosmos. For the pantheistic Stoics, the cosmos is an ensouled animal. The individual soul is part of this cosmic soul, although the ruling part of each individual soul – the mind – is not part of the cosmic mind, for they have different physical locations. My mind is somewhere in my body – either the heart or the head – whereas the cosmic mind is in the heavens. Christelle Veillard focuses her attention on the individual soul and its relationship with the body. We are back to questions about blood and pneuma circulating around the body that feature prominently in the earlier chapters. As with Galen, a central question is how to square belief in an autonomous rational mind with the view that the soul is ultimately material and subject to physical laws. For a solution to this, Veillard turns to the work of the polymath Stoic Posidonius, whom she argues wanted to present the Stoic position as something more complex than mere intellectualism. If the soul is a body, then surely it can be trained in non-rational and physical ways as well as via rational means (p. 161).

In contrast to all these primarily materialist accounts of the soul, Jan Opsomer discusses the Platonic tradition in this period, from the early Academy through to Plutarch. The focus is on attempts to understand Plato's comments about the soul in the Timaeus; Posidonius features prominently here too. The final chapter also touches on the interpretation of Platonic texts, in this case a passage from the Phaedrus. J. P. F. Wynne offers a subtle and fruitful examination of Cicero's use of this passage in the Tusculan Disputations. While it might at first glance seem that Cicero is following Plato in arguing for the eternity of the soul, in fact he makes this argument simply to counter-balance our natural assumption that death is a bad thing. Cicero is neither arguing for the eternity of the soul nor the claim that death is good; he simply wants – as a good sceptic – to undermine our usual assumption that it is bad. It is within this context that he addresses a slightly different question, namely whether the soul ever experiences itself. Does the mind see itself? Wynne argues that Cicero does not think that it does, challenging Augustine's reading of what Cicero says. We do not directly experience our minds, although we can infer their existence from what we do experience. Although Augustine may have got it wrong, his was nevertheless a fruitful misreading, creating a model of subjective self-knowledge whose influence cannot be overestimated.

As I noted at the outset, this is a volume by and for specialists but there is much here that touches on a wide range of issues in philosophy of mind that have by no means gone away. Anyone with interests in mind-body interaction, physicalist accounts of the mind, problems associated with understanding consciousness as an emergent property, and self-knowledge will find something of interest here. They will also hopefully gain a renewed appreciation of how so many contemporary debates were already well underway in the ancient world.