Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment (review)

John P. Wright and Paul Potter, eds. Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. xii + 298 pp. $72.00 (0-19-823840-1).

At the outset, the editors of this splendid collection of essays remark that "[f]ew subjects have stimulated a more intensive intellectual interchange among physicians and philosophers than the nature of the human soul and its relationship to the body" (p. 1). It would be a mistake, however, to expect a neat division between "physicians and philosophers," or a linear story about a unique question, culminating in the late-eighteenth-century emergence of the physique/moral alternative to the body/soul dichotomy. On the contrary. First, the "physicians and metaphysicians" of the title were often—perhaps most of the time, in the history of Western Christianity—indistinguishable except retrospectively: students of physis, of a material nature that included embodied souls, rarely could escape taking into account that the soul is also a spiritual substance separable from the body, and that, as such, its study belongs in metaphysics. Second, by juxtaposing psyche/soma and mind/body—ancient Greek roots and post-Cartesian idioms—the very title of the volume suggests that the history of the "problem" under consideration is far from linear. "Reasoning about souls," writes Gareth Matthews in his chapter on Saint Augustine, "is as old as Western philosophy" (p. 133). But what souls are, how they are named, the functions attributed to them, and the nature of their relation to body (itself an evolving concept) have varied considerably throughout the centuries.

At the same time, taken as a whole, the book points to the existence of a series of "basic problems" and "core meanings" (p. 1). In the introduction, these problems are summarized under three headings: (1) "dualism and the immateriality of the soul," including issues such as the survival of the soul after the death of the body, or the relation between (im)materiality, (im)mortality, and the composition and continuity of the human person; (2) "identifying the soul in the body," including the quest for the physical foundations of mental functions, the clinical observation of the effects of soul on body, and the explanation of mental phenomena in terms of bodily locations or elements; (3) "the functions of psyche and soma," including the different meanings attributed to soul and body—for example, soul as life principle, or as a separable self-reflective mind; body as the outer shell of the real person, as the "nature" of the living organism, or as a mechanical automaton.

Psyche and Soma explores these issues in Hippocratic medicine (Beate Gundert), Plato (T. M. Robinson), Aristotle (Philip J. van der Eijk), Hellenistic philosophy and medicine (Heinrich von Staden), Saint Paul (Theo K. Heckel), Augustine (Gareth Matthews), the Renaissance (Emily Michael), Descartes (Stephen Voss), Pierre Bayle (Thomas M. Lennon), the debate between Stahl and Leibniz (François Duchesneau), eighteenth-century medicine (John P. Wright), vitalism (Roselyne Rey), and the emergence of the physique/moral dualism (François Azouvi). While specialists in one or another topic, thinker, or period may argue with specific points of a chapter, Psyche and Soma works extremely well as a rich (albeit not exhaustive) guide through the motivations and enterprises of "physicians and metaphysicians" considered in the longue durée.

The contributors treat their subject matter as topics in the history of ideas, to be studied through the internal analysis of texts. Some readers will undoubtedly miss a more contextual approach, and would like to know more about the social circumstances and the extratextual functions and meanings of discourses concerning soul and body—for example, how they functioned as normative models for relationships within society. That, however, does not detract from the value of Psyche and Soma as an original and...