Aristotelian notions such as matter, form and substance 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 substance display contents that do not always agree. There is reason for believing that in the Metaphysics Zeta the notion of form embodies 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 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. 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 body, itself endowed with a boundary 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. (shrink)