One of Aristotle's texts that many students begin with, often because their teachers assign it to them or because they're trying to study Aristotle and they read that it's one of the works that one ought to begin with, is this short little text. little kind of mishmash in a lot of ways that we call the categories. And it's got kind of a slow start that seems to be all over the map. And then Aristotle sort of hunkers down and starts plowing his way through the the real core of the text from about chapter 4 on the categories or the predicables, the ways in which we can talk about things. I'm going to shoot a sequence of videos.
I'm not sure how long it's actually going to take me to go through all of this, but this is the first one specifically on the categories. And I think, you know, somebody asked me to do this. One of the reasons I really want to do this, when I first studied Aristotle, This was the first text that was assigned to me and I couldn't make heads or tails of it.
I got really bogged down in the second chapter. I had no idea what he was driving at or trying to get at. My teacher didn't explain it very well to me because frankly I don't think he understood it that well.
And it's always struck me that you know in a lot of ways this is not a text to give somebody a late modern student who Just has no back. background in this sort of stuff whatsoever, and just throw out their hands and say, this is where we're going to start with Aristotle. There might be better ways, more adapted to present-day students to do that, but what I know is that a lot of people are reading this as their introduction to Aristotle, either because they were told that's the way they ought to do it, or because their professor has assigned it to them, or, you know, for some other sort of reason. So I think it's important to to walk through this bit by bit.
And this is one of those sort of texts where a lot of the meaning of the text, the greater meaning, the stuff that brings it all together, you only begin to grasp after you read other Aristotelian texts. So the ethical, political treatises, I would call them, the Nicomachean and Eudemian ethics, the politics, rhetoric, to a certain extent the poetics, the topics, the logical works that this is part of. part of prior analytics, posterior analytics, works like the metaphysics.
A lot of this stuff makes more sense the more and more that you read Aristotle. It's like a net kind of coming together and getting tighter and tighter around certain objects. So be that as it may, this is going to be an introduction to Aristotle's categories. I'm going to run through each of the chapters one at a time in sequence. trying not to skip over any of the points, probably providing more examples than Aristotle himself gives because examples very often help out.
The first thing that I think would be useful to grasp is, what is this text? It is a text that's looking at ways things can be said. That's what categories means. We tend to think about categories as ways of in which we divide things up, right?
The Greek word for category, or the Greek word that's being translated here as category, transliterated, it actually can mean a lot of different things. It can mean what Aristotle is giving it, things that can be said about another thing. It can also mean to attack in a lawsuit.
It's not that sort of meaning that's going on here. But in any case, Aristotle is using this word in a somewhat different way than we're used to. So the category... are about the things that can be said about other things or about a thing.
Now you might say, well, that sounds really basic and actually kind of boring. It is when you put it that way, but once we start getting into it, you'll see that there's a lot of interesting things to explore, and we are going to do some categorization in the sense of splitting things apart from each other and saying, this is something over here, this is something over here. Eros Aristotle is trying to study that. He will lay out for us ten different ways, major ways, in which we talk about things.
He's also interested in how things can be thought, because thought and language go kind of hand in hand. They're not exactly the same thing. But we use language to convey thought.
and also as sort of the vehicle in which we work our thoughts out. So, for Aristotle, this is a logical work. Oftentimes we think of logic as being specifically about the laws of thought.
That's a particularly modern conception of it, because the idea is that logic is not only about what is thought, but what is said and about what is, the things that can be. It is about being. It's a way of understanding. Things in their most general aspects. That's what the Greek term logike, from which we're getting logic, actually means.
It's sort of looking at not just language and thought, but being as a whole and looking at its generic aspects. So, another point that I have down here that I'd like to sort of call attention to, traditionally, categories... is talked about as being the first of the organon.
Organon means tool, but it's come to take on a special meaning with Aristotle as meaning these first logical works that you ought to get down before trying to tackle Aristotle's other works because they'll help you to understand the arguments and put things in the proper framework. I don't actually think that those logical works... do in fact do that all that well, quite often they might give a person a misleading impression.
They are good for learning about methodology. They're good for training your mind. They're also good for finding little snippets here and there where he talks about how it is that we learn things or what definitions are supposed to do. That's useful stuff, but I would say that a good portion of the time You're not going to find a direct application of, say, the categories to the ethical, political works, or if you're interested in Aristotle's natural philosophy, his physical works, or things like that.
So, let's begin where Aristotle begins, in chapter 1. Chapter 1 is very short. It's talking about a distinction, and he's talking about three different ways in which we name things. Now you notice I've got two different books here. They're going to be going in and out of camera that I'll be consulting.
This is the sort of big book of Aristotle, the basic works of Aristotle. I also am a big fan of the Loeb Classic Library series, which has the English on one page and the Greek on the other page, in case I need to look something up. So, he talks about the way things are named. So he's talking about nouns here. And he says that they're named equivocally, they're named univocally, and they're named derivatively.
These are all translations of Greek terms. It's not so important, I think, with these that you actually know the Greek terms. The main thing that we're looking at here is how things are named.
And you can think of this as being named. Because one of the things that Aristotle is not making explicit to you here is that if there's going to be a term that's equivocal, it's equivocal because it along with another instance of that same term are naming different things. So you're always going to have doubles or perhaps triples or more than one thing going on at the same time.
And let's start with... So, talking about it, well, we can start with the equivocal. Okay, so when things are being spoken of equivocally, the same term is being used, or let's say the same word, but different meanings, and Aristotle puts this in terms of definition. in terms of what the thing is. For Aristotle, definitions are supposed to signify what is essential to the thing.
What is it that makes that thing that thing? How do we pick it out from the range of other beings in this range of beings? So, they don't have the same definition.
They have the same word. So, some classic examples of this in English would be the term seal, right? Seal can mean the thing that we actually seal. wax with in sealing envelopes.
It can also mean an animal that lives in the ocean and eats fish and then, you know, when it's in captivity, plays horns and does tricks and things like that. It can also refer to a singer. British singer with a scarred up face and kind of soft music. It can refer to the act of sealing things or that you know that thing like in the seal-a-meal that we used to have when I was a kid seal itself.
It can be the seal of an airlock. Now you notice that some of these are actually kind of similar to each other, that they might actually have a lot more in common. But if we take all of these instances of seal together, they're not the same.
They don't have the same definition. The same word is being used to describe a number of different things. So Aristotle says, things are said to be named equivocally when, although they have a common name, the definition corresponding with the name different So, here's the example that he uses. A real man, a real human being, and a figure in a picture.
Now, they can both be given an additional name. That additional name is animal. I'm an animal because I'm a human being. I'm an actually existing human being.
Is this guy who I'm drawing very terribly, but you get the idea. Give him a smile right here, right? Is he...
a human being. It's a representation of a human being, but it's not a human being in the same sense as what I am. It doesn't have everything that goes into my essence and your essence and the essence of anybody else who's a human being.
He is not an animal in a certain important sense. Really, if you want to describe what he is, he's a stick figure, right? So that's what he has in mind there. He says, The definition in the one case will be appropriate to that case, i.e. the real human being only.
Now, what's at the other extreme? So, some things are univocal, other things can be, or some things are equivocal, other things are univocal. And what this means is that you have One single term, one single word, and same definition.
So, words are being used univocally when they signify the same thing. Like he says, um Both the name and the definition answering to the name and count. So if I call myself a human being and I call you human being, the word human being means the same thing in those cases. If I talk about book and I hold up these two...
two different books, which are actually quite similar because they're both books of Aristotle, right? And I say book. These both have what Aristotle would say, the same essence, the same definition. They are not the same thing because this is one thing and this is another. but they do share that in common and the word book is being used of that univocally on the other hand if i take the bible and i say this is a book it is a book in that sense but then when we break it down we can say well the book of lamentations and that's book in a somewhat different sense isn't it's not quite univocal it's not equivocal either and when we look at other era Aristotelian books, as we would call them, they're divided up into books.
This one isn't because it's too short, but, you know, Topics is divided up into, if I remember right, eight books. Each of those was a scroll. So there's a lot of ways in which we can use things univocally. Most of the time we don't realize that we're doing that.
Aristotle also talks about, again, this term animal. If I have myself, I am an animal. right?
Because I am a human being and human beings are animals. You can't see it in this apartment where I'm shooting, but I actually have a cat laying over on the bed and I could pick her up and show her to you and I could say animal. Now is the term animal being used in a univocal sense? Aristotle would say yes.
It's applying to me. It's also applying to the cat. Why?
Because we are both animals. We are both that kind of thing. Are we exactly the same kind of animal?
No, she's a cat, I'm a human being. Her circulatory Her story system is a little bit different than mine. Her brain is much smaller and lacks certain things that my brain has.
Even that dog brains have, you know, the social reality things. They're finding all this interesting stuff out. But, as far as what makes us animals, that is close enough to being the same that the term is univocal. So I said there's three different kinds. What is the third one?
What have I left out here? Now, in other cases, Aristotle sometimes speaks of analogy. He's not going to do that in this part of the categories.
He's going to talk about derivative terms. But there's a lot of examples. that would fit the bill for what he's talking about here that you find in other works of Aristotle. And I'll bring those up in just a second. So, with derivative terms, how does it work?
He says, things are said to be named derivative terms. derivatively, which derive their name from some other name but differ from it in termination. Now, this makes a little bit more sense in Greek than it does in English. But you could also think of some of the terminations, the suffixes that we use.
So, for example, health, right? Health is in the body of a thing. It's in a healthy state.
Now, you notice I've already changed the word a little bit, right? a body has health, the body is healthy, those are actually univocal because they're referring to the same thing. Now, we can ask whether it's healthy for me to be drinking probably my eighth, ninth cup of coffee today.
Is that healthy in exactly the same sense? Is it univocal with what we mean when we say that my body is healthy or unhealthy? It's not.
And yet it's not equivocal. It's not so completely disconnected from it that we're not even talking about the same thing at all. They just have a name in common. Instead, it's derivative.
In Greek, you can see the derivation much more easily because, you know, you have health and then healthy and, you know, there's a lot of different terminations that take place. There's ways of forming words. We tend to do with suffixes like, you know, the Y ending with producing, with tion, you know, for action kinds of things. things, you know, we've turned them into substantives.
Those all fit what he's talking about as derivative. So there's some sort of, let's call it primary sense. And then there are derived senses. And these are going to correspond to terms that look an awful lot like each other. So So again, healthy, the body is healthy, that's the primary.
sense. Coffee is healthy or unhealthy, depends on how much you drink of it, right, and whether you have coffee allergies. That's a derivative sense. Is exercise healthy?
Yes, exercise is healthy in that it contributes. to health, right? Is my appearance healthy?
You know, acknowledge the fact that I'm overweight, right? That's an unhealthy appearance, although, you know, I still have all my hair in my 40s, so that's probably good too, right? You know, we could go on and on with that.
Those are all derived senses of terms, so those words have a derivative relationship to each other. When we talk about something being healthy, like a healthy portion, a healthy portion, healthy decision. We don't necessarily mean healthy as in the body that's healthy. We mean producing health or indicative of health or likely to lead to health, you know, those sorts of things.
So we have these three different ways of naming things. Univocal on one end, equivocal on the other end, and then somewhere in the middle, this derivative where here, think of this as sort of Goldilocks right? You know here it's at one extreme here it's at another extreme. Over here the words really don't have that much in common with each other. Over here the words actually are so connected with each other that they're practically the same thing.
Here we're talking about some sort of middle ground, something where there is a connection, but it's not a connection of identity, it's a connection of derivation. So that's what's going on in Chapter 1. Let's look now at the second. This is the one that I think is actually proven over the years to be the most confusing for people approaching this for the first time.
It's one that quickly clears up when you've read it. read some other Aristotelian texts, particularly things like the metaphysics, and you understand what he means exactly by predication and by this sort of stuff within. But until then, it gets very, very confusing, I've noticed, for students who are approaching it, including myself the first time.
I had a hard time figuring out what he meant by all this, and then after I did, my attitude was, well, who cares? This doesn't mean anything. That's not really the case. There's actually good reasons why Aristotle is saying things the way that he is here. So, he talks about four possibilities for how things can be, two things can be connected together.
You have a subject, and a subject is the Greek for that is hupokamenon. It literally means that which is underneath. I'm a subject, for example.
You're a subject. Subjects are, in general, individual substances or things, and they have existence or being. They may be dependent on something else. This tie, for example, is a subject.
This jacket is a subject. This coffee cup is a subject. The coffee within it is a subject. Now, Aristotle lays out four different possibilities. You can think of this as sort of a square.
You have this one, but not that one, this one, but not that one, both of them together, or neither one. What is he talking about? He's interested in whether things are predicable of a subject. What does it mean to be predicable of a subject?
It means that it can be said of that in such a way as you're actually conveying some intelligible... information about the subject that is reflective of what that subject actually is or how it is, in what manner it is. We're going to get to these categories or predicables in a few moments. Now, why does he want to talk about that? Well, let's use some examples.
This is an ashtray, a very heavy ashtray, right? I can predicate heavy. of the ashtray. That is part of what it is. Now that's going to be a relative term as we're going to see when we get to the categories.
Hopefully you can see this is also the bluish color that looks almost grayish or blackish depending on the light that you put it in. That would be something that you can say about it as well. It is of this sort, right? But we're going to see color is a little bit different. Can you put things in the actual physical substance of the ashtray?
Yeah, I mean, it's groove for cutting cigars and putting cigars in. That's a possibility. We could go on with all sorts of other examples as well.
So some things are predicable of subjects. You can say of me, for example, human being. You can say of me, animal.
You can say of me, 6 foot 3 inches tall. You can say of me, 42 years old, which will be true. for a while and then cease to be true in about another three months or two months. There's all sorts of examples.
Let's go on. So some things are predicable of subjects, but they're never in a subject. So this word in, this is where things start to get confusing. What does he mean by in?
So Aristotle has a gloss in here which you'd think would clarify things, but it actually tends to make them get a little bit more confusing. He says by in, we do not mean in like the way parts are present in a whole. Right? So think about this book. This is a whole.
It has parts. Are the pages in the book? We do say that the pages are in the book, and they're also of the book.
They compose the book. So he means in in a different way. Now the gloss that he gives is he says incapable of existence apart from the subject.
Now, that's where people get confused. Does he mean incapable of existence apart from that particular subject? Like, think about this.
This chalk, in a certain sense, is now in my pocket, right? Could it be in other pockets? Yeah, because here's another pocket here, here's another pocket here. It's capable of entering into all those sorts of things. Now, this is not the best example, because the chalk is something that actually does have independent existence, right?
Whether it's in my pocket or not. What about knowledge? Where does knowledge exist? You might say, well, it's in the book, or it's in my mind.
That's right. It is in your mind, or your thinking, or however else you want to put it, and it can be in the book in a very similar sense, although the book is actually an aid for our minds. Can the knowledge, any one bit of knowledge, can the knowledge exist apart from anything that it would be in?
Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be in my mind, right? Because I'm contingent. I could disappear.
It doesn't necessarily have to be in your mind. It doesn't necessarily have to be in this book. But if knowledge is to disappear from all of these locations at once, knowledge can't exist. Similarly, let's think about color. Here's a white piece of chalk, right?
There's some more white chalk on the board. No necessity that white must exist just in this particular subject. But if there aren't any physical things for...
white color to inhere in, to be in, then you're not going to have any white. It is something that has to exist in a subject. And those are the sorts of examples that Aristotle actually uses. He says, a certain point of grammatical knowledge is present in the mind, but is not predicable of any subject.
We'll get to that in a moment, what he means by not predicable. Certain whiteness may be present in the body, but it's not predicable of anything. The term white is predicable of the chalk, but what we mean by that is that this chalk has whiteness in it, in the surface of it, in its composition.
If we call somebody knowledgeable, we are predicating knowledgeable of them. We are not predicating knowledge of them, because the knowledge itself is something that has to be... in a subject.
The predicate is something that we can say about the subject. This is a point worth lingering over. Let me say that one more time.
The thing that's in a subject literally is in that subject in some way. It adheres in it. It has its being by being in that subject or by being in some other subject.
Being predicable means being able to be said about that subject. And we have terms that are very close, like knowledgeable predicating of that subject. Knowledge is in the subject. Notice that those are derivative terms, too, aren't they?
So, there are some things that are in a subject but not predicable of a subject. Then there are some things that are both predicable of a subject and in a subject. So, what would be some examples of that? He says, While knowledge is present in the human mind, it's predicable of something else, of grammar. So why is knowledge predicable of grammar?
Because knowledge is a class word that we use, right? It's what Aristotle is going to call a genera, a genus. And grammatical knowledge is one type of knowledge. So when you say...
See, the Greeks didn't have two words for that grammatical knowledge. They just said grammatike, or they might say stratige, the knowledge of strategy, military science, that sort of thing. That is, you can say of them episteme or techne. You can call them crafts or sciences or knowledges, right?
So that means that they are predicable. The word knowledge is predicable. predicable of grammatical knowledge. It's also something that can signify that which is in a subject, that which the knowledge that is actually in a book, or the knowledge that is actually in my mind, or perhaps even my hands, if it's craft knowledge, right?
So there are some things, just to recap, there are some things that are predicable of subjects, but they're never in a subject, right? So you can say them about a subject, but they're not in any sense in the subject itself. There are other things that are in the subject but are not predicable of it. There are some things that are predicable of both. And one of the things I want you to notice here is both predicable of a subject and in a subject.
But notice, are they predicable of... ...of and in the same subject, not in this case. In most cases, when you have one of these both and...
it's not going to be in the same subject. You can, for example, say that that knowledge is in that person's mind, and it's a predicate of the other types of knowledge, it classes them together, in the person's mind. But that's not saying it's of the same thing. It's in the person's mind, and it's of something else that's in the person's mind. You see the key difference there?
Finally, we have some... some things that are neither predicable of a subject nor in a subject. Why not? Well, because they're individual substances. They actually are subjects.
And as Aristotle says, The individual man, the individual horse, those are not things that you can actually predicate of something else, right? Why not? Because it's that thing. If you're going to say Gregory Sadler, now you can use my name and use it for somebody else.
else. Like maybe I have a grandson and he gets named Gregory Sadler II or something like that. There you're transferring the name from one thing to another.
But the actual thing that is me is not itself predicable. of that little imaginary grandson down the line. That doesn't work that way.
Individual substances are what they are. They are the things of which we predicate other things and in which we say that things are or reside or inherit. So, they're not going to be themselves in or predicable in most cases, right? because then Aristotle says, well...
actually some substances can be in other substances. He gives the example here of knowledge as well. He says a certain point of grammatical knowledge is present in a subject.
So there are some things that might, you know, as individual substances or as individual things, not necessarily substances existing on their own, but individual things, be in another thing. In that case, they're actually moving from this class to this class. So, why is Aristotle dwelling on all this?
He wants us to be able to make these distinctions. One of the key things that's really important here, too, is... is he wants us to ask, where are certain things?
Where do they, in fact, reside? What are they dependent upon for their continued being? Individual substances are more perduring. say, than bits of grammatical knowledge, right? So you want to know where is that grammatical knowledge?
Where is that color? What does it actually reside in? Then we also want to be able to distinguish between saying that something is predicable of a subject and in a subject, because the categories are going to be the things that are predicable of them. This in is another type of determination.
That's why I think he's... He's focusing on this. Hopefully now it makes a little bit more sense as we start plowing through the rest of it. Having made it through chapter 2, now we have a little bit of an easy chapter, chapter 3 to look at.
This shouldn't take too much time at all because I think the concepts here are fairly easy to grasp. And what is Aristotle talking about here? He doesn't use this term transitive, but I think that that's useful here.
He's looking at predication. Can predication of one thing be applied to another thing? by the nature of their relations to each other. So, here's something that he says.
If one thing is predicable of another thing, and that thing is predicable of a subject, then that first thing is going to be predicable of that subject. I put it into slightly more formal language here, but that's essentially what he's getting at. So, you know, what are some examples of this? He says, man is predicated of the individual.
man, so if you say human being, anthropos really gets translated over and over again as man, but we can get rid of the gender language and just say human being, anthropos, is predicated of this particular human being, Greg Sadler. Can you predicate anything of human being? Now notice what you're predicating it of.
You're predicating it of a idea or a class or what Aristotle's going to call a species or a G. genus. What can you predicate of it?
Well, What do you know about human beings? What do they all have in common? Bipeds? Rational?
Animals? These are all things that could be predicated of human being, and if they are predicated of human being, then they're predicated of me. Mortal is another example that gets used quite often, right? Human being, rational, mortal animal, as later philosophers will define it. There's that old classic syllogism, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.
That's getting at the same general idea. So... What can we then do in these sort of cases?
What's actually going on? Think about it in its sort of linguistic and metaphysical things. We're taking something that's fairly broad and then we're predicating it as something that's more narrow. So animal, human being, and then we're predicating that of something else which is even more narrow, individual human being, which is animal but is also human being. Can we do this with other things?
Say, knowledge, you know, grammatical knowledge. This particular grammatical knowledge which I happen to have from having studied English, right? The stuff that's in my head, those individual pieces of it. You can predicate the term knowledge of that because knowledge is the genus or the species. Gainos or Eidos in Greek.
that these things belong to. Now, one thing that we do want to be careful with, we have a tendency to read backwards into Aristotle our contemporary use of language, which originally got started, you know, not only with Aristotle, but in large part because of Aristotle. These terms genus and species, we're used to thinking about them in purely biological terms.
For Aristotle, these can mean any sort of classes of of things. Any species is a set of things that all have the same basic definition, are called by the same name, that have the same essence. A genus just means larger.
So there could be some things that are functionally both a genus and a species. You don't have to worry about exactly how to classify them. He's not always entirely consistent in his use of language with that, but he doesn't need to be, because the basic idea is that you have sort of a hierarchy of different, more and more general types of things, and the things that you can say about these, you can say about these, you get more specific, you can say things about those. And this is what brings us to another part of the discussion, which he has to do with what he calls differentiae, or we can translate it as differences, the things that they break down according to lines.
And he says... If genera are different from each other and coordinate, what does that mean? That means that they're on the same level. They're differentiator themselves different in kind. So let's take for an example animal and knowledge.
The animal is a genus and there's a number of different species in it and those can be broken down according to Differentiae, ways of sort of splitting it. So he's got Differentiae that he uses for example here with feet and if you've got feet, maybe you got six feet, maybe you got eight feet, maybe you've got two feet. That would be getting more specific.
Notice more specific, more along the lines of the species. What else we could have? He has some other examples here.
Winged, aquatic. So let's say we introduce aquatic. And we can have all sorts of different classifications of animals.
What about knowledge? Can we apply these differentii over here to sort of split up knowledge? Aristotle says no, because this is a different genre. This is a different genus. What sort of things would we have for knowledge?
It would be more things like... grammatical, strategical, economical, we would... have to have other differentiated and those don't apply to that. So something that we can say about animal, right, if we predicated of animal, it may not be something that we can predicate of the stuff over over here.
It is definitely stuff that we can predicate of the things in here. So something is an animal and it's an animal with feet and it's an animal with two feet. If animals all have respiratory systems. Then you can say that those two-footed animals have respiratory systems. If animals have to eat and digest food, that's something you can predicate of them.
Animals are mobile. Pick anything you like. You can predicate that.
Animals are living things. You can predicate that all the way down the line. You can't jump from one genus to another genus unless that... The genus is somehow underneath it over here.
This is kind of an interesting case, because actually, when I got to thinking about this, so knowledge is not a subclass of animal, right? There are types of knowledge, however, which are about animals. Now that's not the same thing as the class of animals being under the... class of knowledge, right? Because they're not the same kind of being at all.
But we break down knowledge according to the lines of what is it knowledge of, or how does it work, that sort of thing. And so we could say biology and then, you know, break down biology along the same kind of lines as we do the actual species. And that would be very similar to what Aristotle, in fact, does do in his works and wants to see other people do.
when they're carrying out natural science. He wants the knowledge to have a certain structure which is mimicking the structure of the classificatory schemes by which we break things down with genus and then differentiated into species and ultimately all the way down to the individual substance. So that's what this chapter is focused on.
This I think is pretty easy to grasp. We now finally, in chapter four of the categories, get to the actual categories, which we've been, you know, lingering about and hinting at all this time, talking about that which is predicable, because that's what categories means. It means that which we can say about something else.
So, this can be, as we've seen, things that we can say about individual substances, or these might be things that we can actually say about... Things that aren't themselves directly individual substances, but classes of substances. You know, for example, knowledge as a whole as opposed to this individual bit of knowledge.
Animal as opposed to human being or dog as opposed to that dog, that individual human being. So, Aristotle comes up with a list of ten different things, ten different main types of things. 10 different ways in which we talk about things, in which we say something meaningful about something else. And all of these except for the number one category are what we call accidents. But there's a little bit of a difference, and I suggest just in case you want to know something more about accidents and proper accidents and something like that, you look at some of his other texts.
I do have a video on the Topics where I talk a little bit about this with my Intro to Philosophy students. There's more that could be said about that. But these things are all, to some degree, less what the thing is, less permanent, less essential to it, if essential at all, than substances.
So let's start by just rattling off the whole list and then talking about some of the Greek terms because sometimes they can be helpful. So substance, ousia. Ousia is a term that Aristotle is actually making out of the word to be.
So it's the being of the thing. It's the that which the thing is. To say that I am a human being is to name the kind of substance which I am. To say I am this human being is to talk about that particular substance.
Now we have other things. Quantity. How much? I am 6 foot 3 inches tall. That's something about my quantity.
I weigh anywhere between 260 and 280 pounds depending on... Whether I've been exercising or not, that's also about quantity. I am one human being.
I have five fingers. These are all quantitative things that you can say. The Greek word for that is poison, literally meaning how much. How much is there? And poion is another similar Greek word and it means what kind or of what sort.
So quality. What quality is this sort of thing? That's going to be an extremely important category, as we're going to see in some of the later chapters.
And if you go on to study the metaphysics, you'll find out that Aristotle actually says that substance is first, and then quality, and then quantity. Something that's actually reversed in a lot of modern philosophy. Then we have this very broad category of relation, pros-ti. These are two different Greek words. Pros is a preposition.
Ti just means towards it. Something, so in relation to what? We'll talk about some examples of that in a moment. And then you notice I've got the other six placed over here because in some sense these are more accidental than these other these other categories.
We have place, literally the where, you know, where is something? Time, when is something? How long is it in terms of time? We have what we translate as position, case thigh, once you actually see some of the examples of this, I think that'll make a little bit more sense. It's a little bit hard to wrap your head around sometimes.
Condition or state, ehen, which is the verb for holding or having, possessing, and we'll see what he means by that in a moment. And then finally, these two correlatives, action and passion or suffering. Poying, to do, also to make, and... to undergo or to suffer pachsing. Now, like I said, these ten categories are all ways in which we can talk meaningfully about something, to communicate some new information about it, or other things which we could ask about it.
And these could apply to genera as well as to individual subjects. So let's look at Aristotle's own examples, and maybe we'll think of some others. He talks about man being predicated of the individual man.
Animals also predicated of man. So both of those name the kind of substance that somebody like myself is. This is a tie.
You could say, you know, based on its shape and all that sort of stuff, it's a tie. We can talk about the substance that it's made of, cloth, right? There's certain things that we can... say about that.
When I say cloth to you, I'm conveying an intelligibility. I'm telling you what kind of thing this is. If somebody was totally confused, you might begin at a higher level of abstraction. This is an article of clothing because they might actually, you know, take the tie and let's say they come across it and they say, is this some sort of rope by which to climb out of a hamster cage.
Perhaps it's for hamsters. No, it's a tie. It goes on people's necks like this. That's all part of what that thing is. Quantity.
He gives some examples of that as well. He says two cubits long, three cubits long. You know, we can go into all sorts of things.
We don't measure in cubits, inches, centimeters. Think of all the different quantitative measurements that you could engage in, ranging from temperature to... to mass, to velocity, all of those things are quantity and they're predicated of subjects.
So the car is approaching at 65 miles an hour. You're saying something about the quantity. There's one car approaching me very fast. Again, still about the quantity. What about quality?
So he says attributes like white. Okay, so white, that makes sense. White, tall. tall doesn't actually work for that. Old, young, grammatical.
That's the other example he uses. A human being is grammatical when they're able to actually put things together in the right way. Knowledgeable, unknowledgeable, ignorant, wise, foolish.
These are qualities. Good and bad. Moral good and badness. are actually not a matter of substance for Aristotle. Those are things that we predicate of a person or an act or a policy or an idea in terms of its quality.
Quality. Is it beautiful or ugly? Those are qualities.
Is it just or unjust? Those are qualities. So that's a really important category.
Relation. The examples that he gives you are Double, half, and greater. We're going to see a lot of other examples later on.
Father and son, mother and daughter, those would be relations as well. Owner to animal, because we do... own animals. That would be an example of relation. I have dogs that are laying down over there being quiet while I'm teaching this.
Quiet would be a quality which they have. This video is a certain amount of time. That's the quantity. I am shooting the video for you.
That's a relation. So these are some of the major ones. Let's look at some of the other ones. Place.
Where is it? This is where it gets really interesting if we start thinking about cyberspace and things like that. Because those would be attributes, you know, out there on YouTube, I suppose, would be something that you could predicate of this entire video.
Is YouTube a space? I suppose it is. I mean, it does actually have a physical location in that there are servers somewhere.
But you know, that's something to think about in other videos. Time, when does something happen? What time is past?
Is it past, future, present? Time and place go together. They help to determine where something is, when something is. Those are important for Aristotle.
But you notice they're accidental. I exist at many points in time. I am in many different places, of course not at the same time. All right?
Okay, position. He gives the examples of lying or sitting. We could use standing.
Some of this would seem to actually start to blend into some of these other categories, but Aristotle wants to see this as something different. We'll see why when we approach it in some of these other chapters. Shod or armed. Wearing shoes, because not everybody wore shoes back then armed.
Those are examples of condition or state, literally again, possessing, right? So, having coffee, not having coffee, in the sense that I possess coffee, that would be part of this category. In the sense that I made the coffee, that would be action.
In the sense that the coffee makes me jittery if I drink too much of it, that would be passion or suffering, pasquame, right? What are examples that he gives of action and suffering? He uses to lance or to cauterize. To be lanced or to be cauterized. These are medical terms.
Aristotle's father was actually a doctor, a court physician to the Macedonian kings. So Aristotle knows quite a bit about medicine. But you can think about anything else. Hitting somebody, right, would be an action.
Getting hit, in return, would be suffering. Taking the dogs for a walk would be an action. The dogs going for the walk would be something we could predicate of them being taken for a walk, right?
With the cats, petting the cat, action, being petted, an example of this other category of suffering or undergoing or passion. So what we have here are all ten of these categories, all ten ways in which we predicate. things of other things in which we speak intelligibly about them, in which we convey information.
Why is Aristotle so bent on distinguishing these from each other? That you'll understand a little bit more as we go into the further chapters. Some of the chapters he's going to connect these up with each other and also reconsider some of these things about in and predicable.
Some he's going to actually spend going through in great detail through just what is, for example, quality. How many different kinds of quality are there and how are opposite qualities or opposed qualities related to each other? How many different ways is it possible to do that? That's what's going to go on in further chapters. So in chapter 4, where we've gotten to now, he's finally given you the listing of the different categories.
You know that one of them is most primary substance. The rest of them are, to some degree, accidental, less essential. and now we've got Basic building blocks that we need for understanding what's going on in the rest of this work.