Aristotelian notions such as matter, form and substance (or object) should be used carefully; not only is the rich tradition in their background marked by variety of interpretation, even Aristotle's own use of these concepts is far from uniform. In his different works, matter, form and (primary) substance display contents that do not always agree. There is reason for believing that in the Metaphysics Zeta the notion of form embodies (or amounts to) essence, and that accordingly something without essence does not qualify as substance. This cannot be generalized or regarded as Aristotle's standard view, however, for in the Physics there are contexts in which the form is not conceived as (or does not embody) essence. There, “the form or shape” is the arrangement of the substance's parts, or the object's shape, in addition to either all or some of its qualities (i.e., the sensible shape). Outside the Metaphysics, substance, too, seems to be a less distinguished entity. In the Physics, and especially in the Categories, substance is anything capable of independent existence, any particular concrete thing that is a bearer of attributes. To the extent that our modern “object” corresponds to Aristotle's primary substance, it has a similar polysemy. While in some contexts it will mean an articulated object belonging to a specific kind, in others it will denote bodies without organized structure, that is, it will have as extension the particular bits and pieces that fill the world. A similar diversity applies to matter. When understood, for example, as a chunk out of which an artist casts her statue, matter is an object (a substratum), a body, itself endowed with a boundary (a form) and a multitude of properties. But matter can be much simpler than that; it can be a plain homoeomere, a mere element, or as in prime matter, may lack every actual attribute. When in my “Matter and Objecthood” I criticized Henry Laycock's views propounded in “Some Questions of Ontology” I found comparable ambiguities transposed to contemporary discourse. In the paper just cited, Laycock examines the ontic status of matter, contrasting it with objects as particular concrete things; throughout his discussion no radical distinction is made between articulated objects and unorganized bodies. In my criticism I employed ‘object’ in the same inclusive sense.

It would be hard to deny that there is some modal doctrine in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, for the Tractatus contains the standard semantics for the classical propositional calculus and the standard semantics is modal. Moreover, the work makes serious use of modal concepts, especially that of a possible state of affairs (möglich Sachverhalt). Given the centrality of this notion, it is curious that commentators have so readily ignored the modal aspects of the Tractatus Raymond Bradley's excellent, full-blown study of Wittgenstein's early modalism is, therefore, all the more welcome as a corrective.

Norm and Nature: The Movements of Legal Thought, by Roger Shiner, is an intricate book with the perhaps surprising thesis that the outstanding problem in legal philosophy, the conflict between positivism and natural law, is irresolvable. The controversy is doomed to a never-ending cycle because “sophisticated positivism follows from positivism's difficulties with simple positivism … anti-positivism follows from sophisticated positivism's difficulties with simple positivism; [and] simple positivism follows from positivism's difficulties with anti-positivism” (p. 281). For legal theory, then, an understanding of law is simply an understanding of why legal theory is thus “condemned to endless dialectic” (p. 324). And the reason is found in the nature of law itself and the perennial tension between, on the one hand, certainty and procedure and, on the other, flexibility and substance.

Collected readings on journalism and the mass media truly abound, from surveys to case studies, so another volume needs some justification. Elliot D. Cohen says his collection is needed because there is a dearth of good writing on philosophical issues in journalism. Cohen should know. As editor of the International Journal of Applied Philosophy, he has been a crusader for the philosophy of journalism.