Psychology

This second Companion deals with the ancient theories of the psyche. The essays range over more than eight hundred years of psychological inquiry and provide critical analyses not only of the ancient discussions of the nature of the psyche and its states but of such central topics as perception subjectivity the explanation of action and what it is to be a person. In examining the wide variety of psychological theories offered by the ancient thinkers from the increasingly complex materialism of the Presocratics and Hellenists to the dualism of Plato and Plotinus the collection demonstrates that psychology had become a wide-ranging and sophisticated discipline long before Descartes.