The Magician, the Witch, and the Law (review)

502 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY thing looked at as intelligible; form is substance in the primary sense and the first constitutive principle of things. In respect of intelligibility, essence can be partially identified with form, although form as substance in the primary sense is not exhausted by its partial identity with essence. So it is entirely inaccurate to speak of essence as a sufficient condition of matter (such a relation is metaphysical, not epistemic , and involves form as distinct from essence) and nonsensical to speak of "the essence of a river on your land" (just as a definition of "river" would not include location, essence cannot be located on anyone's land). This problem of terminology becomes progressively more serious in the remainder of the book. In his discussion concerning continuity and personal identity (chap. 3), Hartman begins with a sound gloss on Nicomachean Ethics t, 7, l~ "The function of the man is the characteristically reasonable activity (energe/a is often used in this sense) of his soul; so his capacity for such activities is his soul" (p. 94). Yet two pages later Hartman concludes, "A person is a body" (p. 96); yet two more pages, "To be sure, Aristotle denies that the soul is identical with any sort of body" (p. 99). The next discussion (chap. 4) concerns the sense in which "the soul might as well be thought identical to the heart" (p. 131 ). Throughout these arguments, Hartman mixes qualifications, distinctions, texts, and terminologies so completely that it becomes impossible to identify either his own view or that attributed to Aristotle. But what is most remarkable in all this is Hartman's conclusion (chap. 6): Aristotle 's notion of nous returns him to the Platonism and universals against which (according to Hartman) he posited material objects as primary substance in the first place. Finally, then, what starts out as Hartman's primary claim for Aristotle as a materialist is abandoned in the final chapter. Here the argument that begins with the sentence "The heart of the message is that Aristotle is a materialist in the most important sense of the word" (p. 6; cf. p. 12, quoted above) concludes with the sentence: "According to Aristotle as well as to Plato, once we know that a faculty somehow connected with us is constantly contemplating species and genera and indeed always has, we are supposed to need to know no more about exactly how these universals get into our souls" (p. 269). In his early arguments (pp. 14ff.), Hartman reduces species to individuals, wrongly, as I have suggested above; now he groups species together with genera as universals, equally wrongly, as I have also suggested above. At the end of this book, the reader can only feel unclear as to what its central thesis is--or if he finds that clear, he may well doubt the arguments supporting it. HELEN S. LANG Trinity College,Hartford Edward Peters. The Magician, the Witch, and the Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978. Pp. xviii + 218. $15.95. This very provocative, informative, but at times disappointing book is "a study of medieval conceptions of ... maleficium.... a generic term [used] to designate both BOOK REVIEWS 503 magic and witchcraft"(p, ix). Thus to set witchcraft beside magic as facets of the same problem is a relatively new departure in serious scholarly writing about the occult. Professor Peters argues convincingly that the usual separation of these two belief-systems in modern analyses is often a distinction without a historical difference. In making this significant point, Peters offers excellent descriptions of later medieval courtly society and legal machinery as contexts for changes in the idea of maleficium, but the accounts he gives of the philosophico-scientific and rhetorical backgrounds of these developments are not as satisfactory. In fact, Peters gives only brief attention to the impact of Greek and Moslem science and philosophy on later medieval notions of magic, and he entirely ignores their role in forming ancient and early Christian attitudes toward the occult. This is unfortunate because in Western culture claims about magic cannot be thoroughly understood apart from the metaphysical, physical, and cosmological assumptions implicit or explicit in such claims. Astrology, for example...