This fine book is the late but not too late fruit of the ‘Symposium Hellenisticum’ 2016, which took place in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Under its somewhat unoriginal title we find sophisticated, substantial and occasionally exciting new essays on the Hellenistic philosophy of mind. This at least is how the editors Inwood and Warren describe the topic around which the essays of the volume revolve. They emphasise the similarities with the situation in contemporary philosophy of mind when they say that in Hellenistic times philosophers self-consciously argued against the backdrop of a long history that fully explored the conceptual landscape of possible positions on the mind–body problem, while there was also much philosophical attention paid to the then burgeoning findings of empirical science. Of course, this fruitful comparison has its limitations. Much of the Hellenistic debate concerned questions that are not covered by the mainstream of modern philosophy of mind, which does, for instance, not even dream of speaking about the immortality of the intellect or about a cosmic soul. And there is also the question of whether the Hellenistic conception of the mind was the same as ours in the first place. The essays bring out the dissimilarities in full. They also make clear the high level of sophistication both of the philosophical positions of Hellenistic thinkers and of the scholarly endeavours of bringing their views back to light.
S. Berryman's ‘Hellenistic Medicine, Strato, and Aristotle's Theory of Soul’ makes a start with a bold discussion of Strato of Lampsakos’ views on body and soul. Against the received view, she argues that Strato's ideas about pneuma, the nervous system and the seat of the commanding centre of the soul (the hêgemonikon – according to Pollux) in the ‘mid-brow’ are not likely to depend on early Stoicism; what is more plausible to have made Theophrastus’ successor in the Lyceum adopt such views, she argues, was simply the discovery of the nervous system by Herophilus and Erasistratus, whose significance was not likely to have escaped his scientific recognition. Thus Strato, far from defecting from it, merely adapted Aristotelianism to the new discoveries while remaining committed to the broader Peripatetic framework of teleology and hylomorphism. Berryman also ventures to make a similar case for the theory of sexual reproduction in which she attributes a two-seed theory to Strato, but here the textual evidence is scantier, and her case thus unavoidably less convincing.
D. Leith, in ‘Herophilus and Erasistratus on the Hēgemonikon’, casts a fresh and critical look on the textual evidence for Herophilus’ and Erasistratus’ discovery of the nervous system in the early third century bc. Leith rejects the evidence from the Aetian Placita, which ascribes to these two doctors the discovery of the location of the hêgemonikon in (different parts of) the brain, on the grounds that the Placita account is contaminated with Chrysippus’ philosophical discussion of their new anatomical findings; Chrysippus, who must have felt the threat that the discovery posed to his cardiocentrism, will probably have discussed Herophilus’ and Erasistratus’ discoveries in his book On the Soul, where he tried to drive a wedge between the location of the motor functions and the seat of the hêgemonikon, so as to save his cardiocentrism as much as this was possible in the light of the new scientific evidence. Leith shows that the link between the nervous system and the seat of the hêgemonikon is entirely absent in the sources on Herophilus and Erasistratus outside the Aetian Placita, concluding that there is ‘no sign’ that these doctors ‘put forward a fully-fledged theory of the soul’ (p. 46). The chapter ends with briefly applying this line of argument to a similar case. This is the doctrine attributed to Strato of Lampsakos, that the hêgemonikon is located in the space between the eyebrows. Leith argues that this attribution is probably due to a Stoic source that mistook an argument that Strato originally had made in favour of the (Aristotelian) thesis that acts of perception do not take place in the peripheral sense organs but in the central organ as a claim about the hêgemonikon. As readers will have noticed, this clashes with Berryman's main thesis in the previous chapter. Leith's impressively competent discussions of questions of detail, most notably of the fragmentary evidence of Herophilus and Erasistratus, make his case almost irresistible, even if his suggestions about the sources of the false link between the nervous system and the hêgemonikon must likewise rely on certain psychological hypotheses. While Berryman argues on the basis of the likelihood with which empirical facts of science were recognised by Strato, Leith's argument relies on the somewhat myopic focus on the hêgemonikon by later readers of Strato's texts.
P. van der Eijk's contribution, ‘Galen on Soul, Mixture and Pneuma’, brings order into what must appear an impenetrable thicket to anyone not as familiar with the work of Galen of Pergamum as the author himself. This is Galen's seemingly conflicting statements regarding the direction of causation from mind to body or, vice versa, from body to mind. More specifically, the question is whether the body and its various processes causally determine our mental life (‘material determinism’) or rather the soul the body (by using the body as an instrument, ‘teleological instrumentalism’). With masterful command of the vast texts van der Eijk tracks the candidates for material determinism on two levels (the mixture of the elements and the various kinds of pneuma that flow in the body). The result confirms E. Zeller's judgement about Galen that he ‘stands closest to the Peripatetic school’ (Philosophie der Griechen 5 III.1, p. 824): there is a general framework of the growth and functioning of natural bodies, set by teleology, and it is only within that teleological framework that the particular bodily structures and their physiological processes make sense. It is teleological nature that arranges things in such a way that the bodily, physiological and psychological features of animals correspond in the way they do. Only once this order is in place, the lower-level material structures and processes acquire their meaning – but also their share of autonomy (within the boundaries of that teleological framework). This autonomy can be far-reaching. It is capable of determining not only emotional reactions but also character traits and even the acquisition of certain capacities.
F. Verde, in ‘The Partition of the Soul’, revisits the history of the famous distinction in Epicurean psychology between two parts of the soul, anima and animus, familiar from Lucretius’ poem. Using evidence from later Epicureans (Demetrius Lacon and Diogenes of Oenoanda), he is able to show that there is no good reason to saddle Epicurus in his Letter to Herodotus with that distinction, as has been done previously by scholars who followed a textual conjecture proposed by J. Woltjer for § 63 of the Letter, namely to replace to meros, ‘the part’, by ti meros, ‘a part’, in the sense of a part of the soul. Verde argues that the distinction between two parts of the soul is more likely to be the product of a later Epicurean engagement with the discussion about the seat of the hêgemonikon.
F. Ademollo's ‘Cosmic and Individual Soul in Early Stoicism’ discusses the Stoic claim that the human soul is both a part of the world-soul and analogous to it. As in Verde's contribution, in an exemplary combination of philosophical reconstruction of argument with a critical analysis of the relevant sources, Ademollo shows what the problematic consequences of that claim are and how the Stoics could have avoided them. There is no room to present his subtle line of argument here, but his most important and, to me at least, immediately convincing move is his interpretation of ‘part’ as ‘offspring’. The Stoics probably thought of the relation between the cosmic and the human soul along the lines of a father–son relation. With this, Ademollo removes much of the awkwardness of the Stoic claim and makes a whole class of ancient arguments for the existence of a divine cosmic intelligence look much more reasonable.
C. Veillard's ‘Soul, Pneuma, and Blood’ delves into the physical aspects of Stoic psychology and the interaction of psychic pneuma with other bodies such as air and fire in particular. Veillard emphasises the doctrinal continuity of the school arguing that Posidonius’ and Diogenes of Babylonia's treatment of the non-rational aspects of human behaviour merely unfolds a tendency that was present already in Chrysippus. The possibility of this, she argues, is based on a certain double-sidedness of Stoic psychology: ‘every mental event has two sides’, an intellectual (logical) and a physical one (p. 160). One would like to hear more about how exactly the Stoics may have conceptualised this Spinozian sounding distinction.
J. Opsomer, in ‘The Platonic Soul, from the Early Academy to the First Century ce’, takes us into Platonic doctrinal school tradition. He shows that there is a continuous exegetical tradition of engagement with Plato's description of the composition of the world soul in Tim. 35a, which includes, among others, the Stoic Posidonius and stretches from the early Academy down to Plutarch of Chaeronea. This makes clear that there was a continuous tradition of dogmatic Platonism also in the times of the sceptic Academy. Opsomer offers a detailed overview of the different interpreters and the various philosophical interests they took in Plato's ideas about the structuring features of reality as a whole (see the instructive table on pp. 196–7). This is a momentous result, even if Plato's description of the composition of the world soul in the Timaeus is extremely abstract and far removed from the issues of contemporary philosophy of mind.
This changes with J.P.F. Wynne's ‘Cicero on the Soul's Sensation of Itself: Tusculans I.49–76’, which marks the worthy finale of the volume. Wynne argues that Cicero, in his argument for the immortality of the rational soul, did not say that the rational soul is ‘immediately conscious of itself’, but that it can know itself only by way of a rational understanding of the external world. Since many readers of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations have taken him to say the former, most notably Augustine, the question about the meaning of a premise of a Ciceronian argument for the immortality of the rational soul suddenly becomes charged with historical and philosophical relevance (via Augustine's influence on Descartes). This makes the chapter an exciting reading: is the mind transparent to itself? Wynne is able to make a very good case for his reading on philological and on philosophical grounds. But to what extent are we entitled to interpret Cicero's – or indeed any ancient author's – views about the rational soul as claims about the mind? Wynne is aware of the difficulty, refraining from translating Cicero's terminology into ‘any contemporary language for the philosophy of mind’ (p. 200). Much remains to be done.
This collection is highly commendable. It contains penetrating and sophisticated discussions of various themes of the Hellenistic debates about the soul and its relation to the body. It is representative of the best current research in the area and deepens our understanding of a period in the history of philosophy that remains intriguingly close and at the same time elusive to us.
