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Michael V. Wedin. Aristotle's theory of Substance: The Categories and Metaphysics Zeta. Oxford Aristotle Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 482. Cloth, $55.00.
Michael Wedin has written the equivalent for Aristotle of what biblical scholars would call a "harmony of the gospels." It is a wonderfully rich and argumentatively dense reconstruction of Aristotle's two most important treatises on substance, the Categories and Metaphysics Zeta, works that many of our most able Aristotle scholars have declared irreconcilable.
The first chapter, on "the plan" of the Categories, includes a sensible account of the role in that work of the "onymies," as Wedin calls homonymy, synonymy, and paronymy. The second chapter, which focuses on "nonsubstantial individuals" in the Categories, gives the most philosophically sophisticated reconstruction known to me of how Aristotle might have conceived this white in Socrates to be a nonrecurrent particular. Having myself contributed to the glut of recent scholarship on nonsubstantial individuals in the Categories, I have personal, as well as professional, reasons to praise the rigor and insight of this chapter.
In Chapter 3 Wedin tries to pin down the ontological commitment of Aristotle's Categories. Since, if there were no primary substances there would not be anything else, the fundamental ontological commitment of the Categories is a commitment to primary substances. Individual nonsubstances exist just in case...