Categories (Owen)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~16,600 words · 79 passages
Cite this work
- APAAristotle. (n.d.). Categories (Owen). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/categories-owen
- MLAAristotle. Categories (Owen). Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/categories-owen.
- ChicagoAristotle. Categories (Owen). Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/aristotle/categories-owen.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The text with which Western logic began: the list of the ten basic ways of saying something about a thing.
Context and history
Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, having, doing, being affected. The list is short and so is the book, but the idea behind it settled two thousand years of metaphysics: that among all the things which can be said there is one that exists in its own right — primary substance, this man, this horse — and everything else exists only by being said of it. Boethius translated it into Latin, and through the Middle Ages it was, together with Porphyry's introduction, the first book anyone read on beginning to study: the quarrel of universals comes out of it. It opened the 'Organon', the body of Aristotle's logical writings, and it is short by nature; the difficulties are there all the same.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
and species. Moreover, the primary substances, because they are subject to all the rest, and all the others are predicated of, or exist in, these, are most properly termed substances, but the same relation which the primary substances bear to all other things, do the species and genera of the first substances bear to all the rest, since of these, are all the rest predicated, for you will say that "a certain man" is "a grammarian," and therefore you will call both "man" and "animal" "a grammarian," and in like manner of the rest. 12. No substance in a subject. It is common however to every substance, not to be in a subject, for neither is the primal substance in a subject, nor is it predicated of any; but of the secondary substances, that none of them is in a subject, is evident from this; "man" is predicated of "some certain" subject "man," but is not in a subject, for "man" is not in "a certain man." So also "animal" is predicated of "some certain" subject "man," but "animal" is not in "a certain man." 13. Of inhesives the name may be predicated of the subject, but not the definition. Moreover of those which are, in the subject, nothing prevents the name from being sometimes predicated of the subject, but that the definition should be predicated of it, is impossible. Of secondary substances however the definition and the name are both predicated of the subject, for you will predicate the definition of "a man" concerning "a certain man," 14. The latter may be predicated of secondary substances. and likewise the definition of "animal," so that substance, may not be amongst the number, of those things which are in a subject.