Abstract

philosophers have been largely indifferent to questions about their own means of expression. It is as though they had tacitly established a distinc- tion between form and matter, and had also asserted an order of priority between them: the "matter" was what they would deal with-the form of its expression being an accidental feature of the acts of conception and communication. To be sure, there is a method, or at least a dogma, behind this inclination