Entry on "Categories" for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Categories. Histories and Perspectives
2018
The reflection upon the categories leaves a fundamental mark in the history of philosophy. By theorizing such issue, philosophy gains a meta-reflexive feature, which is probably one of the most distinguishing traits of this kind of knowledge, including its method. In the history of philosophy, the question of the categories has been gradually investigated and clarified but it still remains to be solved. Therefore, from a philosophical perspective, the history of the categories is far from coming to an end: since ancient times, it has been debated and discussed, thus revealing all its theoretical potential. Such a broad history should be taken into account by any present study that wants to represent a real progress in the research, in order to avoid repeating errors that have been already made in the past. Among other things, this is one of the objectives of the present volume, which comes from the will to describe some paths and perspectives of this history, without claiming to deliver an exhaustive overview and rather representing the rst partial contribution to a wider project.
Categories. Histories and Perspectives 2
Categories. Histories and Perspectives 2, 2019
This is the second volume devoted to the history of the question of categories, an issue which was also the focus of the collective volume published in 2017. The aim is still to describe some trajectories and perspectives of this history, without claiming an exhaustive overview of it, but rather representing a contribution to a wider project, which is gradually reaching its goal. In this volume the problem of categories has been investigated in the work of further philosophers, from Plato to Quine; in this way the present work complements that done in the fi rst volume. Th e question of categories has been dealt with in diff erent times and contexts, sometimes coming into the foreground and sometimes concealing itself-and this is something worthy of investigation in itself. It is also interesting to understand why in particular contexts greater attention is paid to a particular issue that had previously lost its centrality.
The construction of ontological categories
Australasian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 82, No. 4, pp. 595–620; December 2004, 2004
I describe an account of ontological categories which does justice to the facts that not all categories are ontological categories and that ontological categories can stand in containment relations. The account sorts objects into different categories in the same way in which grammar sorts expressions. It then identifies the ontological categories with those which play a certain role in the systematization of collections of categories. The paper concludes by noting that on my account what ontological categories there are is partially interest-relative, and that furthermore no object can belong essentially to its ontological category.
Ta semata: on a genealogy of the idea of ontological categories
My hypothesis is that some figures of speech, like catalogs, present in the sapient epics of Hesiod and Homer, as well as figures emerging from a discursive field of veracity belonging to the newborn 5th century forensic rhetoric, help building the originality of Parmenides’ categorical ontological language. Especially for the characteristics of Being, presented in fragment B8 as signals: σήματα. I would also like to add to these elements of language, the interest of the originary physicists tradition (φυσικῶν) on limits (περάτων). With these genealogic views, we can speculate about some important parameters of ontological categories as: subordination, attribution and opposition.
Series: Works of Philosophy and their Reception, 2024
Tracing the Arabic reception of Aristotle’s Categories entails charting the history of a foundational philosophical work across three continents, from Spain to India, over a span of at least ten centuries (9th–19th c.). This chapter offers an overview of the most significant phases of this reception and highlights key doctrinal debates. The first section examines the Arabic translations of the Categories and related Greek commentaries realized between the 9th and the 10th centuries, drawing on manuscript and bio-bibliographical sources. The second section delves into the development of an Arabic scholarly reflection on the Categories between the 9th and 11th centuries and the formation of a philosophical discourse surrounding a selection of key issues that would shape the subsequent reception of the treatise. Central among these key issues is the question of the scope of the Categories and its disciplinary classification. The third section presents Avicenna’s (d. 1037) novel ontological interpretation of the Categories and the resulting repositioning of the treatise within metaphysics. The fourth section investigates the broader impact of Avicenna’s reassessment of the place of the treatise in the post-Avicennian tradition (12th-14th c.). Finally, the fifth section presents the ‘traditionalist’ interpretations of the Categories that emerged in response to the mainstream consensus on the ontological reading of the treatise established by the post-Avicennian tradition (12th-18th c.).
Ontological Categories and the Transversality Requirement
2020
Which categories of entities qualify as ontological categories? And which combinations of categories qualify as adequate systems of ontological categories? These are the two questions I focus in this paper. Contrary to the usual praxis in contemporary ontological literature, I address both questions conjointly. First, I present some problems of characterizing ontological categories in purely extensional terms, i.e. as widely inclusive natural classes. Second, I introduce the transversality requirement: ontological categories should be individually and naturally domain-transversal, i.e. ontological categories must be neutral concerning different scientific disciplines like physics, biology and mathematics. As a result, ontological categories must have instances in any domain of reality. Finally, I check the adequacy of some systems of ontological categories according to this criterion and meet some possible objections.