HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT OF MIND

Subtitled 'Speculations about Soul, Mind and Spirit from Homer to Hume', this is a magisterial work that belongs on the shelf of any serious student of philosophy and psychology of mind, dealing as it does with historical, linguistic and conceptual issues relating to the understanding of the human mind. The subtitle indicates that the last two centuries are not covered - perhaps the subject of another volume - and that Eastern ideas are also excluded. But the depth and breadth of coverage of the Western philosophical traditions is quite outstanding.

The study begins with Ancient Hebrew and Homeric Greek accounts of the life-force, analysing the meanings of such key words as nepesh, ruach, phrenes and psyche. This yields a rich crop of nuanced insights so that the reader cannot but use such terms more judiciously in future, even if one thought one had some previous understanding! This helps to illustrate one of Macdonald's schemes of the progression of meanings: (concrete + outward > (concrete + inward) > (abstract and inward) > (self-referring or reflexive). Then the process becomes more subtle and complex when various meanings reciprocally influence each other. However, such key terms provide templates that continue to influence our thinking to this day. A central theme - the nature and putative immortality of the soul - is introduced early on in a discussion of Homer, and reappears throughout the book in different guises.

Plato is seen to introduce the soul primarily in an ethical context, while Aristotle uses the term as a formative or organising principle, the function of which has been replaced in modern times by physical and biological fields. Students of philosophy will know how the influence of Plato and Aristotle is woven through the history of Western thought with periodic revivals or shifts of emphasis between a top-down/inside-out view and a bottom-up, outside-in view. All this is skilfully narrated by Macdonald as his book unfolds.

After a tour of the Stoics, Epicurus and Lucretius, the author arrives at Christianity with Paul and the Christian Fathers as far as Augustine, who synthesised Christian with Platonic thought. There is a very thorough section on Plotinus, who was the first to make rationality essential to the soul by encouraging first-person reflection. However, for Plotinus the process relates the soul to the world-soul, while for Descartes it is only the mind that is in question. Macdonald follows on with analyses of Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Tertullian, as well as lesser known figures such as Minucius Felix. By the time one reaches Augustine, the philosophical landscape begins to become more familiar.

The next chapter addresses mediaeval Islamic and Christian ideas such as Avicenna, Averroes, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, with a long section on Dante. Then comes Renaissance Platonism with its emphasis on the centrality and dignity of the human being - Petrarch, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Bruno. Macdonald draws on a vast range of sources to elucidate the ideas and the influence of these thinkers, to whom we should perhaps be returning for inspiration today. An unusual chapter follows, covering mind and soul in English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare before we arrive at 'the triumph of rationalist concepts of mind and intellect' with Descartes, Galileo, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

However, apart from these well-known luminaries, the extra interest of Macdonald's text lies in his treatment of other figures such as Lady Anne Conway (1631-79), Henry More (1614-87), Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) and Kenelm Digby (1603-1665). For instance, we are told that Conway 'vigorously disagreed with Cartesian dualism, arguing that body and spirit were inter-convertible because they only differed as modes of one and the same underlying substance'. More was engaged in the issue that a mechanistic explanation of the world might lead to atheism and maintained a serious interest in what would now be called the paranormal.

In his conclusion, Macdonald discusses the influence of Shamanism on the idea of the immortality of the soul, i.e. results from experience rather than conceptual thought. This created a problem when it came to mapping a non-Greek concept onto the accepted usage of psyche. The pneuma (spirit) becomes in Christianity a gift from God, challenging any idea of the intrinsic immortality of the soul. This in turn has allowed modern theologians to agree with the materialism of science while invoking Divine power in the after-death state. Macdonald usefully relates the problem of the immortality of the soul to that of the oneness or two-ness of human nature. He rightly says that 'without other premises to the contrary being advanced, to claim that the soul survives the bodily death of the person whose soul it was would seem to indicate both a real and conceptual separability between these two entities'. This is precisely the structural conundrum of the mind-body problem, which makes it so difficult for the modern scientific mind to resolve.

Although Macdonald himself does not resolve it either, he does point out that, 'in addition to the ambiguities hidden behind oneness and two-ness, mortality and immortality, the paired terms material and immaterial do not mark off the same opposition as corporeal and incorporeal'. And, he could have added, corporeal and incorporeal are not the same as embodied and disembodied or physical and non-physical, since Western philosophy has no concept of the subtle body, which might help resolve some of these apparent contradictions. However, as I said at the beginning of this review, Macdonald's book is a seminal one for anyone trying to understand the complex history of the concepts of soul, mind and spirit.