Categories

Summary

The Categories is a short treatise, fifteen chapters in the Edghill translation, that asks what kinds of things we are talking about when we say anything at all. Aristotle opens not with the world but with names: a painted animal and a living one share the word 'animal' equivocally, a man and an ox share it univocally, and the grammarian takes his name derivatively from grammar. He then draws the distinction on which much of the book turns, between what is 'said of' a subject (man is said of the individual man) and what is 'present in' a subject (a particular point of grammatical knowledge is present in a mind and cannot exist apart from it). Chapter 4 gives the famous list. Every uncombined expression signifies substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action or affection, and Aristotle's examples are homely: 'in the Lyceum', 'yesterday', 'shod', 'armed', 'to lance', 'to be cauterized'. Only when such terms are combined do we get statements that can be true or false. The long fifth chapter argues that the individual thing, this man or this horse, is substance in the primary sense; species and genera are 'secondary substances', and everything else is either said of primary substances or present in them. The distinctive mark of a substance is that one and the same thing can receive contraries while remaining itself: the same person is warm and later cold, good and later bad. Chapters 6 to 8 work through quantity (discrete and continuous, admitting no contrary), relation (double and half, master and slave, knowledge and the knowable, with the claim that the knowable can exist before anyone knows it), and quality, which Aristotle divides into habits and dispositions, natural capacities, affective qualities, and shape. Here he separates lasting traits from passing states: the man who blushes once from shame has been affected; the man whose complexion or temper is settled has a quality. The last chapters, traditionally called the Postpraedicamenta, sort four kinds of opposition (correlatives, contraries, privation and possession, affirmation and negation), the senses of 'prior' and 'simultaneous', six kinds of motion, and the uses of 'to have'. The book matters in a classical Christian school because its vocabulary became the grammar of later thought. Through Porphyry's Isagoge and Boethius' Latin translation, the words substance, accident, quality and relation passed into the medieval schools, and theologians later used them, with careful qualification, in discussing the Trinity and the sacraments. Reading the Categories itself lets students meet these terms in their first, plainer setting, and it trains a useful habit: asking of any sentence what sort of thing its subject is and what kind of thing is being said of it. The library attaches the public-domain E. M. Edghill translation (Project Gutenberg #2412), whose numbered 'Parts' match the traditional fifteen chapters, so every locator in this record can be checked against the text.

Plot or Argument

• Names and the two ways of belonging (Parts 1–3)

  Aristotle defines equivocal, univocal and derivative naming, then distinguishes simple from composite expressions. He sets out a fourfold grid: some things are said of a subject but not present in one (the species 'man'), some are present in a subject but not said of one (a particular whiteness), some are both (knowledge, present in the soul and said of grammar), and some are neither (the individual man or horse). What is predicated of a predicate is predicated of the subject as well.

• The ten heads of predication (Part 4)

  Uncombined expressions signify substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action or affection. None of these alone is true or false; truth and falsity arise only in affirmations and denials that combine them. The examples, drawn from daily Athenian life and the surgeon's work, make the list concrete rather than abstract.

• Substance first and second (Part 5)

  Primary substance is the individual, neither said of nor present in a subject. Species and genera are secondary substances, the species more truly substance than the genus because it tells more about the individual. Substance has no contrary and does not admit of more and less, but one numerically identical substance can receive contrary qualities in turn. Aristotle tests and rejects the objection that statements and opinions also receive contraries: they change truth-value because the facts change, not because they themselves alter.

• Quantity, relation and quality (Parts 6–8)

  Quantity is discrete (number, speech) or continuous (lines, surfaces, bodies, time, place); it has no contrary, since 'great' and 'small' are really relative. Relatives are defined by reference to something else and must be named precisely, so that correlatives reciprocate. Aristotle notes that the object of knowledge seems prior to knowledge, as the squaring of the circle may be knowable before anyone knows it. Quality comprises lasting habits (knowledge, virtue) and fleeting dispositions (heat, illness), inborn capacities, affective qualities and affections, and figure. Quality admits of contraries and of degree, and likeness belongs to it.

• Action, affection and the remaining heads (Part 9)

  Action and affection admit contraries and degrees: to heat and to be heated, to be pleased and to be vexed. Position, time, place and state are passed over briefly as self-explanatory once the earlier heads are clear.

• Opposition, priority and change (Parts 10–15)

  Aristotle distinguishes four kinds of opposite: correlatives (double and half), contraries (good and bad), privation and possession (blindness and sight), and affirmation and negation, the only pair in which one member must be true and the other false. He argues that the contrary of a good is an evil, though an evil may have another evil for its contrary, as excess and defect. He then lists five senses of 'prior', the senses of 'simultaneous', six kinds of motion (generation, destruction, increase, diminution, alteration, change of place), and the several senses of 'to have'.

Lessons

• The individual comes first

  Aristotle's most surprising claim, against his teacher Plato's emphasis on the Forms, is that the most real thing is the particular: this man, this horse. Species and genus are real and knowable, but they would have nowhere to exist if there were no individuals. For students the point is practical as well as metaphysical. Knowing that someone is 'a sophomore' or 'an athlete' tells us something true, but the person is more than the class; the class depends on the person, not the other way round.

  • Why does Aristotle say that if primary substances did not exist, nothing else could exist?
  • Is the species 'man' more or less real than Socrates? Give Aristotle's answer and then your own.
  • Where in ordinary speech do we treat a category as if it were more real than the individuals in it?

• Staying oneself through change

  In Part 5 the mark of substance is that it remains numerically one while receiving contraries: warm then cold, good then bad. A colour cannot become its opposite and still be that colour, but a person can become better or worse and remain the same person. This makes moral change intelligible. Repentance, growth and decline all presuppose a subject who persists through them and to whom the change can be credited or charged.

  • What examples does Aristotle give of one substance receiving contrary qualities?
  • Why does he deny that a statement 'receives' falsity in the way a body receives coldness?
  • If a person did not remain the same through change, could he be praised, blamed or forgiven?

• Habit, disposition and the shape of a character

  Part 8 separates a disposition, quickly gained and quickly lost (a chill, a passing illness), from a habit, firm and hard to displace (knowledge, justice, self-restraint). Aristotle also separates the man who blushes once from shame from the man whose complexion is settled, and the man irritable when vexed from the man of irascible temper. The distinction gives students a precise vocabulary for self-examination: a single lapse is not yet a vice, but repeated lapses can harden into one, and virtue is valued precisely because it is not easily dislodged.

  • How does Aristotle tell a habit from a disposition, and what can turn one into the other?
  • Why does he say a man who loses his temper when vexed is not yet called bad-tempered?
  • What practices would turn a good disposition into a settled habit?

• Naming things exactly

  In the discussion of relatives Aristotle insists that correlatives be 'exactly designated': the correlative of a wing is not 'bird' but 'the winged', and the correlative of a slave is not 'man' but 'master'. Where no word exists, he says it is our duty to coin one. The lesson in method is that sloppy naming produces false reasoning, and that careful thought sometimes requires new words. The chapter's own example of master and slave reflects the Greek household of its day; Aristotle uses it as a logical illustration, and students can note the assumption without letting it obscure the point about language.

  • Why is 'bird' the wrong correlative for 'wing'?
  • Find a modern debate in which an inexact name produces confusion.
  • When is it legitimate to invent a new word, and when does it become jargon?

Context

The Categories stands first in the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical writings assembled by later editors, traditionally associated with Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century BC. It reached the Latin West early: Porphyry's Isagoge, an introduction to it written in the third century AD, and Boethius' sixth-century Latin translation and commentary made it one of the few Aristotelian texts studied continuously in the early medieval schools, long before the rest of the corpus was recovered in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Composition

The treatise is usually placed early in Aristotle's career, around the time of his years in Plato's Academy or shortly after, but no firm date is possible; 'c. 350 BC' is a conventional estimate. Its authenticity was questioned in antiquity and is still debated, especially for Parts 10–15, which some scholars regard as a later appendix. The library's text is E. M. Edghill's translation for the Oxford Works of Aristotle, reproduced from Project Gutenberg #2412.

Reception

Neoplatonist commentators such as Porphyry, Dexippus and Simplicius debated whether the categories classify words, concepts or things. Boethius' On the Trinity asks how the categories apply when they are predicated of God, and medieval logicians built the 'Old Logic' (logica vetus) around this book. Later critics, including Kant, objected that Aristotle's list was gathered empirically rather than derived from a principle. The work was included in the Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990), volume 7.

Comparisons

• Sophist

  The Sophist's Eleatic Stranger names five 'greatest kinds' (being, rest, motion, same, other) to explain how false speech is possible. Aristotle's ten categories answer a related question differently: instead of kinds that blend, he sorts the ways something can be said of a subject, and he locates truth and falsity in combinations of terms.

• On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations

  On Interpretation picks up exactly where Part 4 stops, analysing the affirmations and denials that arise when uncombined terms are joined. The Topics also lists ten categories, there called 'kinds of predicates', with 'what it is' in place of 'substance', which helps students see how the scheme served the practice of debate.

• Metaphysics

  Metaphysics Book VII reopens the question the Categories seemed to settle: there Aristotle asks whether form, matter or the compound is most truly substance, and the individual of Part 5 is no longer simply taken as basic. Reading the two together shows a thinker revising his own vocabulary.

• Posterior Analytics and Physics

  The six kinds of motion in Part 14 become the subject of the Physics, which treats change as the actualizing of what exists potentially and reduces the kinds of change to change in substance, quantity, quality and place, a direct use of the categories.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The Categories is a logical treatise, not a medical one, but its examples are drawn from the body and the clinic often enough to interest a historian of medicine. Lancing and cauterizing are its stock examples of action and affection; health and disease illustrate dispositions and contraries; blindness illustrates privation. Most useful for psychiatry is Part 8, where Aristotle distinguishes a passing affection (blushing from shame, irritation when vexed) from a lasting quality (an inborn temper, insanity, a complexion settled by long disease). This is an ancient analogue to the distinction between state and trait, offered by Aristotle as a point about how we speak of people; reading it as a clinical theory goes beyond the text. His remark that a man's constitution may produce a matching complexion reflects Greek ideas of bodily temperament rather than any observation the modern reader should accept as fact.

• Part 4

  'To lance' and 'to cauterize' given as examples of action, 'to be lanced' and 'to be cauterized' of affection.

  Surgery
• Part 8

  Habits contrasted with dispositions: knowledge is hard to displace unless some great upheaval such as disease intervenes; heat, cold, disease and health are quickly changing dispositions; health as an inborn capacity to resist unhealthy influences.

  Mind Body
• Part 8

  Blushing from shame and pallor from fear as affections; settled complexion from constitution, long disease or sunburn as qualities; inborn insanity and irascibility as psychic qualities, passing irritation as an affection.

  Mind Body Madness Psychosis
• Part 10

  Blindness, baldness and toothlessness as privations; change runs from possession to privation but not back, whereas the sick can become well.

  Disability Deformity

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Take a single sentence from a newspaper and sort every word or phrase in it into one of Aristotle's ten categories. Which category was hardest to fill, and which words resisted sorting?

• Dialogue

  Write a short dialogue between Aristotle and Plato's Eleatic Stranger on the question whether 'man' or this man is more truly real, each using his own book's examples.

• Essay

  Using Part 8, write an essay on the difference between a bad day and a bad character. When does a disposition harden into a habit, and what does that imply for how we should judge ourselves and others?

• Classroom

  Find a pair of correlatives that Aristotle would say is 'inexactly designated' in common speech, then coin a better term in the way Part 7 recommends and defend it.

Further Reading

• Isagoge, Porphyry

  The third-century introduction to the Categories that framed its medieval study and posed the problem of universals.

• Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione, J. L. Ackrill

  Clarendon Aristotle Series translation with a close philosophical commentary; the standard modern English study.

• Aristotle for Everybody, Mortimer J. Adler

  An accessible introduction for students to Aristotle's way of sorting things.

• Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction, Jonathan Barnes

  A brief, reliable account of Aristotle's life and works.