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DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-N005-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-N005-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/categories/v-1

1. Categories in Aristotle

Despite the historical importance of category theory in Western philosophy, it is remarkably difficult to grasp what a category is and how a category theory might achieve legitimacy. To a degree, such elusiveness is simply the product of the lengthy and elaborate historical development these theories have sustained, but the profundity of the issues they broach also contributes to the puzzle – and hence to the abiding interest – of categories.

Orthodoxy has it that Aristotle in the treatise appropriately entitled Categories introduces categories to the Western tradition: ‘of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or doing or being-affected’ (1b 25–7). Despite what his phrasing might easily be (and often has been) taken to imply, Aristotle plainly intends to refer, not to linguistic items, but rather to their referents. Thus his sentence might be paraphrased ‘of things to which we can refer in uncombined (namely syntactically simple) language, each is.….’, and it enumerates all the types of being there are: substances, such as human beings; quantities, such as three feet long; qualities, such as red; and so forth. But although his manner of expression is in one sense misleading, it should not be deplored or dismissed as merely something like a trivial confusion of material and formal modes of speech. Rather, here, as so often elsewhere, Aristotle is moving from what we would regard as features of language to features of the world without so much as signalling any recognition that there is a transition to be made. Nor does he explain how he arrived at his list, or why one should feel confident that it is comprehensive (see Aristotle §7).

To complicate matters further, there are compelling grounds for the belief that, despite the tradition, the genera of being with which the Categories deals are not (Aristotelian) categories. The word which we transliterate ‘category’ is employed by Aristotle to mean ‘predicate’ or ‘(type of) predication’, so that a ‘category theory’ ought to be a theory of predication, not of being. And in a relatively unfamiliar text, Topics (I 9), this is just what we do find. After saying that the types of predication must be distinguished, Aristotle provides a list identical to that in the Categories – except that the first item is not ‘substance’, but ‘what it is’ (103b 21–3). In the Categories, individuals such as Socrates are substances pre-eminently, and species such as human being are substances secondarily: in the Topics, in contrast, colour is the ‘what it is’ of red no less than human being is the ‘what it is’ of Socrates.

What the Topics delivers, then, is a theory of predication according to which the predicates which can characterize any subject whatsoever will fall into ten ultimate kinds. Again, defence of this list in particular (or of the possibility of constructing any non-arbitrary, correct list) is lacking; but reflection on why the Topics was written might make the absence of this defence considerably less shocking, though at the cost, ironically enough, of undermining the status which the categories of the Categories have historically enjoyed. The Topics as a whole comprises prescriptions for the classification and analysis of a vast array of the sorts of argument then current in Greek philosophy. The intention is combative as well as constructive: Aristotle also teaches how to detect and dismember what he considers sorts of fallacious reasoning, and prime among these is ignorant or malicious exploitation of confusion in manner of predication. For example, what is good about food? That it does something – it produces pleasure. What is good about human beings? That they are ‘of a certain quality, such as temperate or courageous or just’ (Topics I 15.107A). So, if viewed as a digest of types of predication already familiar from the practices of Greek dialectic, the categories of the Topics require no defence beyond reasonable fidelity to the range of predicates actually found in the typical dialectical repertoire. In particular, there need be no presumption that predicational categories rooted in philosophical practice will correspond to a significant, let alone universal, ontological classification.

This is not to say that predicational and ontological categories are unrelated. Because Aristotle moves with disconcerting freedom from language to the world, he takes it for granted that predicate expressions do usually, without the possibility of radical misrepresentation, refer to real entities. So a scheme of predicational categories might indeed suggest at least the outline of a corresponding ontological scheme, one justified in detail and scope precisely to the extent that the original classification of predicates, and its extension, are well-founded. If this is the correct account of how these theories developed in Aristotle, what prompted the substitution of ontological ‘substance’ for predicational ‘what it is’? Perhaps the governing idea of the Categories is that substance alone can serve as the subject in which items from other categories inhere: for instance, Socrates, but not his height, is pale-skinned and can properly be said to be pale-skinned. Therefore the design of the treatise is to convince us that, at its deepest level, ontology is marked by a crucial asymmetry between substantial and non-substantial being, quite possibly in a spirit hostile to the elevation of Platonic Forms which, far from being most real, would figure as no more than non-substantial, parasitic things. If so, a further irony is that the Categories was intended to establish a metaphysical thesis essentially independent of the grand classificatory ambitions with which it came to be historically associated. In the event, the philosophical tradition which was dominated by the followers of Aristotle since late antiquity, elevated the ontological categories into a system uniquely capable of displaying the lineaments of what is (see Being §2; Substance).

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Citing this article:
Wardy, Robert. Categories in Aristotle. Categories, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N005-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/categories/v-1/sections/categories-in-aristotle.
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