CATEGORIA. — Originally it meant “accusation,” that is, the judicial action opposed to “apology,” according to Aristotle (Rhet., I, 3, 1358b 11), who seems to have been the first to use the term “c.” in a strictly philosophical sense, making it the subject of the first treatise of the Organon. The c. are the meanings possessed by the terms of a judgment when they are used by themselves “without any synthesis,” such as “man,” “horse,” “runs,” “wins”; they are therefore the most characteristic “indications and determinations” of language, thought, and reality: not exclusively “predicates,” because Aristotle includes among the c., indeed places first, individual substance or the ultimate subject (Met., IX, 1, 1042 a 26). In fact, Boethius rendered the Greek term not as predicate, praedicatum, but as praedicamentum, which is that which in some way enters into a predication either as subject or as predicate; it is therefore pointless to criticize, as some modern thinkers do (N. Hartmann), the Aristotelian notion on the grounds that not all c. are “predicates.” According to David the Armenian, the c. are the meanings of “first position” (Scholia, 29 b 21), namely: substance, quantity, quality, relation, action, passion, place, time, position, and possession. But it seems that this is not a fixed number, since while the earlier works give the complete list (Cat., 4, 1 b 25; Top., I, 9, 103 b 20), the more mature works give lists varying from a maximum of eight (Met., XII, 12, 1068 a 8) down to six, five, four, or only three (v. H. Bonitz, Index Ar., 378 a 49 ff). Nor is the order constant, except that substance always occupies the place of honor. Hence also the root, or pretext, of the arduous controversies that have troubled Aristotelians of every age. First of all, the question is whether the categorial list should be understood as a classification of words alone, “φωνά” (Alexander of Aphrodisias, Eustathius, and the nominalists), of concepts alone, “νόματα” (Herminius and the conceptualists), or of things alone, “πράγματα” (Plotinus, Porphyry, the Stoics, and the ontologists). David, to whom we owe the report (Scholia, 28 b 7 ff.), prudently regards the three solutions as mutually connected moments of the single interpretation that adequately conveys the character and fullness of Aristotelian realism: the c. are “simple words which signify simple realities by means of simple concepts” (op. cit., 29 b 25). Trendelenburg, while acknowledging their metaphysical significance, maintained that the primary derivation of the Aristotelian c. is purely grammatical: the first four correspond to nouns together with adjectives and numerals, the last four to verbs, and the two middle ones to adverbs. An ingenious hypothesis, and one that contains an undeniable element of truth, but lacking direct confirmation in the Aristotelian texts, where the derivation of the c. is always presented in an exquisitely
theoretical manner and must therefore have its basis in metaphysics (Bonitz, Brentano, Ragnisco, Ross, together with the realists of the school).
The c. refer back to and concern “being,” whose various forms accessible in experience they express, first through concepts and then through words. Thus foreign to Aristotle’s mind is O. Apelt’s attempt to see in the c. the “formal functions” performed by “is” as the copula of the judgment: an exegesis moreover constantly contradicted by the texts, which sharply distinguish the logical and real meanings (v. : Met., V, 7, 1017 a 8 ff; X, 10, 1051 a 35 ff., etc). One must adhere to the forceful Aristotelian expression “categories of being,” “genera of being,” and to the declaration that “as many as are the ways in which being is said, so many are its meanings” (Met., V, 7, loc. cit.). The c. are “genera,” that is, conceptual determinations of minimal content, not further resolvable, into which all the other determinations of denser content within their own sphere are resolved, as can readily be observed by ascending the tree of Porphyry from the bottom upward. Moreover, they are called c. and genera of “being,” thereby indicating both the content and the principle of division. The c. classify real being, not the mental concepts of being, the predicables. But since they classify it in a defined, and therefore limited and univocal, form, they are no less distinct from the divisions belonging to being in the breadth of analogy: finite and infinite, act and potency, essence and existence... Between this essentially ontological division and the predicables (v.) lies the division of the c., which thus shares in the nature of both and can consequently serve as a mediator between them. And since, for Aristotle, the forms of being and their actual connection precede and ground the apprehension and connection formed by the mind, this mediation or ambivalence of the categorial classification simultaneously assures the rational character of his metaphysics and the realistic background of his logic. Having as its content and principle of derivation real being, that is, the compound of essence and the act of being, the derivation expresses the manner in which a real nature comes to possess the act of being: that nature which has sufficient consistency to possess the act of being directly in itself, and is therefore a subsistent subject, is substance (v.); whereas that which can exist only “in another,” as a modification of the nature of the latter, is accident; accidents, in turn, are further divided according to the nature and modalities of this belonging to substance. Attempts, therefore, to place at the center of the classification either motion (Bröcker), or relation (Zeller), or pure “essence” as such (N. Hartmann), remain outside Aristotelian-Thomist realism.
Since the c. must express the economy of thought in determining reality with respect to mutable and manifold experience, the meaning and determination of the c. themselves depend on the concept of reality that a philosophy adopts at its outset. Thus, in philosophies for which being is “given” and offered to the contemplating mind (objectivism), the c. are determinations of being before they are determinations of thought, and they qualify thought only in dependence on being, whether reality is held to consist in purely subsistent “forms” (Platonism), in the modalities of material concreteness (Stoic and Epicurean materialism), or in the modalities of being as such (Aristotelianism).
When, however, with Kant the “thing in itself” was declared inaccessible and judgments of truth could
no longer coincide with judgments of reality, the c. were reduced to a determination of thought itself: the c. express the a priori possibility of judgments of experience, from which the physical and mathematical sciences result (synthetic a priori judgments). Kant found twelve, which he divided into four groups of three each, namely according to quantity, quality, relation, and modality (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B. 107, ed. Kehrbach 97). Considered at their root, the c. for Kant had to express the forms according to which the spontaneity of the transcendental “I think” is actualized; this, as Hegel observes, contradicted their initial derivation from the traditional table of judgments: the c. must be deduced necessarily through the internal and exclusive development of the subject or of thought itself (Enc., I, §§ 42–44). Thus, amid the tangled growth of post-Kantian philosophy, the problem of the c. lost its specific significance and passed into the background, until it was eliminated altogether in Gentilian actualism, where the “act” is everything and every thing, and is always itself in every thing, in the infinite process of becoming (G. Gentile. La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, 2ª ed., Messina 1923, p. 245).
Nel pensiero contemporaneo la nozione di c. tende ad usi sempre più vaghi ed estesi ed è applicata per indicare qualsiasi classificazione in qualunque ordine: si parla perciò di c. del conoscere, dell'essere, di c. essenziali, esistenziali, logiche, psicologiche, etiche, economiche, politiche, religiose e via dicendo; ma così va perduto anche il problema teorico che era legato a questa nozione.