Inontology, thetheory of categories concerns itself with thecategories of being: the highestgenera orkinds of entities.[1] To investigate the categories of being, or simplycategories, is to determine the most fundamental and the broadestclasses of entities.[2] A distinction between such categories, in making the categories or applying them, is called anontological distinction. Various systems of categories have been proposed, they often include categories forsubstances,properties,relations,states of affairs orevents.[3][4] A representative question within the theory of categories might articulate itself, for example, in a query like, "Are universals prior to particulars?"
The process of abstraction required to discover the number and names of the categories of being has been undertaken by many philosophers sinceAristotle and involves the careful inspection of each concept to ensure that there is no higher category or categories under which that concept could be subsumed.[5] Thescholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries developed Aristotle's ideas.[6] For example,Gilbert of Poitiers divides Aristotle's ten categories into two sets, primary and secondary, according to whether they inhere in the subject or not:
Furthermore, followingPorphyry’s likening of the classificatory hierarchy to atree, they concluded that the major classes could be subdivided to form subclasses, for example,Substance could be divided intoGenus and Species, andQuality could be subdivided intoProperty and Accident, depending on whether the property was necessary or contingent.[8] An alternative line of development was taken byPlotinus in the second century who by a process of abstraction reduced Aristotle's list of ten categories to five: Substance, Relation, Quantity, Motion and Quality.[9] Plotinus further suggested that the latter three categories of his list, namely Quantity, Motion and Quality correspond to three different kinds of relation and that these three categories could therefore be subsumed under the category of Relation.[10] This was to lead to the supposition that there were only two categories at the top of the hierarchical tree, namely Substance and Relation. Many supposed that relations only exist in the mind. Substance and Relation, then, are closely commutative with Matter and Mind--this is expressed most clearly in the dualism ofRené Descartes.[11]
The Stoics held that allbeings (ὄντα)—although not all things (τινά)—arematerial.[14] Besides the existing beings, they admitted four incorporeals (asomata): time, place, void, and sayable.[15] They were held to be just 'subsisting' while such a status was denied to universals.[16] Thus, they acceptedAnaxagoras's idea (as did Aristotle) that if an object is hot, it is because some part of a universal heat body had entered the object. But, unlike Aristotle, they extended the idea to cover allchance incidents. Thus, if an object is red, it would be because some part of a universal red body had entered the object.
They held that there were fourcategories:
A simple example of the Stoic categories in use is provided by Jacques Brunschwig:
I am a certain lump of matter, and thereby a substance, an existent something (and thus far that is all); I am a man, and this individual man that I am, and thereby qualified by a common quality and a peculiar one; I am sitting or standing, disposed in a certain way; I am the father of my children, the fellow citizen of my fellow citizens, disposed in a certain way in relation to something else.[17]
One ofAristotle’s early interests lay in the classification of the natural world, how for example the genus "animal" could be first divided into "two-footed animal" and then into "wingless, two-footed animal".[18] He realised that the distinctions were being made according to the qualities the animal possesses, the quantity of its parts and the kind of motion that it exhibits. To fully complete the proposition "this animal is ..." Aristotle stated in his work on theCategories that there were ten kinds of predicate where ...
"... each signifies either substance or quantity or quality or relation or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or acting or being acted upon".[19]
He realised that predicates could be simple or complex. The simple kinds consist of a subject and a predicate linked together by the "categorical" or inherent type of relation. For Aristotle the more complex kinds were limited to propositions where the predicate is compounded of two of the above categories for example "this is a horse running". More complex kinds of proposition were only discovered after Aristotle by the Stoic,Chrysippus,[20] who developed the "hypothetical" and "disjunctive" types ofsyllogism and these were terms which were to be developed through theMiddle Ages[21] and were to reappear inKant's system of categories.
Category came into use withAristotle's essayCategories, in which he discussed univocal andequivocal terms, predication, and ten categories:[22]
Plotinus in writing hisEnneads around AD 250 recorded that "Philosophy at a very early age investigated the number and character of the existents ... some found ten, others less ... to some the genera were the first principles, to others only a generic classification of existents."[23] He realised that some categories were reducible to others saying "Why are not Beauty, Goodness and the virtues, Knowledge and Intelligence included among the primary genera?"[24] He concluded that suchtranscendental categories and even thecategories of Aristotle were in some way posterior to the threeEleatic categories first recorded in Plato's dialogueParmenides and which comprised the following three coupled terms:
Plotinus called these "the hearth of reality"[26] deriving from them not only the three categories of Quantity, Motion and Quality but also what came to be known as "the three moments of theNeoplatonic world process":
Plotinus likened the three to the centre, the radii and the circumference of a circle, and clearly thought that the principles underlying the categories were the first principles of creation. "From a single root all being multiplies." Similar ideas were to be introduced into Early Christian thought by, for example,Gregory of Nazianzus who summed it up saying "Therefore, Unity, having from all eternity arrived by motion at duality, came to rest inTrinity."[28]
Kant and Hegel accused the Aristotelian table of categories of being 'rhapsodic', derived arbitrarily and in bulk from experience, without any systematicnecessity.[29]
The early modern dualism, which has been described above, of Mind and Matter or Subject and Relation, as reflected in the writings of Descartes underwent a substantial revision in the late 18th century. The first objections to this stance were formulated in the eighteenth century byImmanuel Kant who realised that we can say nothing aboutSubstance except through the relation of the subject to other things.[30]
For example: In the sentence "This is a house" the substantive subject "house" only gains meaning in relation to human use patterns or to other similar houses. The category of Substance disappears fromKant's tables, and under the heading of Relation, Kant listsinter alia the three relationship types of Disjunction, Causality and Inherence.[31] The three older concepts of Quantity, Motion and Quality, asPeirce discovered, could be subsumed under these three broader headings in thatQuantity relates to the subject through the relation ofDisjunction; Motion relates to the subject through the relation ofCausality; andQuality relates to the subject through the relation ofInherence.[32] Sets of three continued to play an important part in the nineteenth century development of the categories, most notably inG.W.F. Hegel's extensive tabulation of categories,[33] and inC.S. Peirce's categories set out in his work on the logic of relations. One of Peirce's contributions was to call the three primary categories Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness[34] which both emphasises their general nature, and avoids the confusion of having the same name for both the category itself and for a concept within that category.
In a separate development, and building on the notion of primary and secondary categories introduced by the Scholastics,Kant introduced the idea that secondary or "derivative" categories could be derived from the primary categories through the combination of one primary category with another.[35] This would result in the formation of three secondary categories: the first, "Community" was an example that Kant gave of such a derivative category; the second, "Modality", introduced by Kant, was a term which Hegel, in developing Kant's dialectical method, showed could also be seen as a derivative category;[36] and the third, "Spirit" or "Will" were terms thatHegel[37] andSchopenhauer[38] were developing separately for use in their own systems.Karl Jaspers in the twentieth century, in his development of existential categories, brought the three together, allowing for differences in terminology, as Substantiality, Communication and Will.[39] This pattern of three primary and three secondary categories was used most notably in the nineteenth century byPeter Mark Roget to form the six headings of hisThesaurus of English Words and Phrases. The headings used were the three objective categories of Abstract Relation, Space (including Motion) and Matter and the three subjective categories of Intellect, Feeling and Volition, and he found that under these six headings all the words of the English language, and hence any possible predicate, could be assembled.[40]
In theCritique of Pure Reason (1781),Immanuel Kant argued that thecategories are part of our own mental structure and consist of a set ofa priori concepts through which we interpret the world around us.[41] These concepts correspond to twelve logical functions of the understanding which we use to make judgements and there are therefore two tables given in theCritique, one of the Judgements and a corresponding one for theCategories.[42] To give an example, the logical function behind our reasoning from ground to consequence (based on theHypothetical relation) underlies our understanding of the world in terms of cause and effect (theCausal relation). In each table the number twelve arises from, firstly, an initial division into two: the Mathematical and the Dynamical; a second division of each of these headings into a further two: Quantity and Quality, and Relation and Modality respectively; and, thirdly, each of these then divides into a further three subheadings as follows.
Table of Judgements Mathematical
Dynamical
| Table of Categories Mathematical Dynamical
|
Criticism of Kant's system followed, firstly, byArthur Schopenhauer, who amongst other things was unhappy with the term "Community", and declared that the tables "do open violence to truth, treating it as nature was treated by old-fashioned gardeners",[43] and secondly, byW.T.Stace who in his bookThe Philosophy of Hegel suggested that in order to make Kant's structure completely symmetrical a third category would need to be added to the Mathematical and the Dynamical.[44] This, he said, Hegel was to do with his category of concept.
G.W.F. Hegel in hisScience of Logic (1812) attempted to provide a more comprehensive system of categories than Kant and developed a structure that was almost entirely triadic.[45] So important were the categories to Hegel that he claimed the first principle of the world, which he called the "absolute", is "a system of categories ... the categories must be the reason of which the world is a consequent".[46]
Using his own logical method ofsublation, later called theHegelian dialectic, reasoning from the abstract through the negative to the concrete, he arrived at a hierarchy of some 270 categories, as explained byW. T. Stace. The three very highest categories were "logic", "nature" and "spirit". The three highest categories of "logic", however, he called "being", "essence", and "notion" which he explained as follows:
Schopenhauer's category that corresponded with "notion" was that of "idea", which in hisFour-Fold Root of Sufficient Reason he complemented with the category of the "will".[48] The title of his major work wasThe World as Will and Idea. The two other complementary categories, reflecting one of Hegel's initial divisions, were those of Being and Becoming. At around the same time,Goethe was developing his colour theories in theFarbenlehre of 1810, and introduced similar principles of combination and complementation, symbolising, for Goethe, "the primordial relations which belong both to nature and vision".[49]Hegel in hisScience of Logic accordingly asks us to see his system not as a tree but as a circle.
In the twentieth century the primacy of the division between the subjective and the objective, or between mind and matter, was disputed by, among others,Bertrand Russell[50] andGilbert Ryle.[51] Philosophy began to move away from the metaphysics of categorisation towards the linguistic problem of trying to differentiate between, and define, the words being used.Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conclusion was that there were no clear definitions which we can give to words and categories but only a "halo" or "corona"[52] of related meanings radiating around each term. Gilbert Ryle thought the problem could be seen in terms of dealing with "a galaxy of ideas" rather than a single idea, and suggested thatcategory mistakes are made when a concept (e.g. "university"), understood as falling under one category (e.g. abstract idea), is used as though it falls under another (e.g. physical object).[53] With regard to the visual analogies being used,Peirce andLewis,[54] just likePlotinus earlier,[55] likened the terms of propositions to points, and the relations between the terms to lines. Peirce, taking this further, talked of univalent, bivalent and trivalent relations linking predicates to their subject and it is just the number and types of relation linking subject and predicate that determine the category into which a predicate might fall.[56] Primary categories contain concepts where there is one dominant kind of relation to the subject. Secondary categories contain concepts where there are two dominant kinds of relation. Examples of the latter were given byHeidegger in his two propositions "the house is on the creek" where the two dominant relations are spatial location (Disjunction) and cultural association (Inherence), and "the house is eighteenth century" where the two relations are temporal location (Causality) and cultural quality (Inherence).[57] A third example may be inferred from Kant in the proposition "the house is impressive orsublime" where the two relations are spatial or mathematical disposition (Disjunction) and dynamic or motive power (Causality).[58] BothPeirce andWittgenstein[59] introduced the analogy ofcolour theory in order to illustrate the shades of meanings of words. Primary categories, like primary colours, are analytical representing the furthest we can go in terms of analysis and abstraction and include Quantity, Motion and Quality. Secondary categories, like secondary colours, are synthetic and include concepts such as Substance, Community and Spirit.
Apart from these, the categorial scheme ofAlfred North Whitehead and his Process Philosophy, alongsideNicolai Hartmann and his Critical Realism, remain one of the most detailed and advanced systems in categorial research in metaphysics.
Charles Sanders Peirce, who had read Kant and Hegel closely, and who also had some knowledge of Aristotle, proposed a system of merely three phenomenological categories:Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which he repeatedly invoked in his subsequent writings. Like Hegel, C.S. Peirce attempted to develop a system of categories from a single indisputable principle, in Peirce's case the notion that in the first instance he could only be aware of his own ideas. "It seems that the true categories of consciousness are first, feeling ... second, a sense of resistance ... and third, synthetic consciousness, or thought".[60]Elsewhere he called the three primary categories:Quality, Reaction andMeaning, and evenFirstness, Secondness and Thirdness, saying, "perhaps it is not right to call these categories conceptions, they are so intangible that they are rather tones or tints upon conceptions":[61]
Although Peirce's three categories correspond to the three concepts of relation given in Kant's tables, the sequence is now reversed and follows that given byHegel, and indeed before Hegel of the three moments of the world-process given byPlotinus. Later, Peirce gave a mathematical reason for there being three categories in that although monadic, dyadic and triadic nodes are irreducible, every node of a higher valency is reducible to a "compound of triadic relations".[63]Ferdinand de Saussure, who was developing "semiology" in France just as Peirce was developing "semiotics" in the US, likened each term of a proposition to "the centre of a constellation, the point where other coordinate terms, the sum of which is indefinite, converge".[64]
Edmund Husserl (1962, 2000) wrote extensively about categorial systems as part of hisphenomenology.[65][66]
ForGilbert Ryle (1949), a category (in particular a "category mistake") is an important semantic concept, but one having only loose affinities to an ontological category.[67]
Contemporary systems of categories have been proposed byJohn G. Bennett (The Dramatic Universe, 4 vols., 1956–65),[68]Wilfrid Sellars (1974),[69]Reinhardt Grossmann (1983, 1992), Johansson (1989), Hoffman and Rosenkrantz (1994),Roderick Chisholm (1996),Barry Smith (ontologist) (2003), andJonathan Lowe (2006).
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