Aristotle:

Categories

Are primary substances the foundation of reality?

Discussion

Look at this photograph of a baby. Can the baby see a rattle? Explain your answer.

–well the baby’s eyes work, so yes the baby can see the rattle.

–but does it see a rattle?

–well it doesn’t know what a rattle is, so it doesn’t know that it is a rattle, perhaps it just sees a shape.

–But the baby doesn’t know what a shape is either, or a colour, or a texture. So it can’t know that it sees those things either!

The baby can see the rattle in the sense that it’s eyes function, but it can’t see a rattle insofar as it cannot understand or comprehend the object as a rattle.

The word ‘rattle’ can refer to this particular rattle, or it can refer to a type or category of thing. The baby can see the particular thing, but it doesn’t understand what kind of thing it is.

Background

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was born in Stagira in Northern Greece. At about the age of 17, he went to Athens and became a student of Plato. After Plato died, at the request of King Phillip II of Macedon, he became the tutor of Alexander the Great. He taught the young Alexander for about ten years and then set up his own library in a temple called the Lyceum. There Aristotle wrote wonderful works about logic, biology, physics, ethics, politics, education, literary criticism and many other subjects. It is estimated that only about a third of his writings have survived, and most of what we have were not intended to be made public but were just lecture notes.

Aristotle’s philosophical bag was grouping things, and then grouping those groups of things, and so on, until you had a big hierarchy of groups.

One place you will have probably met Aristotle’s hierarchies is in Biology. You’ve probably seen diagrams that look a bit like this one:

Aristotle was the first person to begin classifying living things.

He thought that classification was the way to organise one’s investigations into anything. Classifying things helps to organise what you know and tell you where to look next.

In order to start classifying something, we need to be able to describe it. And Aristotle’s book, Categories, is all about how we describe things.

Univocal and Equivocal words

The first thing that Aristotle points out is that some words only have one meaning - they are univocal - and other words (in fact most words) have more than one meaning - they are equivocal. So we need to be aware of that.

Descriptions are made up of at least two words, and they can be true or false.

For example, I could say, the rattle is a toy. The word toy is equivocal -it has many different meanings. Look it up on dictionary.com. If I say that the rattle is a toy, which sense of the word toy am I using?

Primary and Secondary substances

The next thing we need to note is the difference between a word used to name a particular thing and a word used to describe a thing - a category or type of thing.

For example, think about the following sentence:

The rattle is a RATTLE.

In this sentence rattle is the name of a particular thing, but RATTLE is a kind of thing.

Now think about this sentence:

A RATTLE is a toy.

In this sentence, RATTLE is still referring to a kind of thing, and not a particular thing. It is a sentence about a group of things. The giveaway is often the use of a rather than the. The often shows that we are talking about a particular thing, whereas a shows that we are talking about any one of a group.

Aristotle called the particular things primary substances, and the groups or categories secondary substances.

Categories of Categories

This is important because it gives us the beginning of our hierarchy: The rattle in the picture is in the category of rattles.

But we can go further —what kind of thing, what category of thing is the category of rattles? Well they are toys. And toys (in the sense we are using the word) are playthings, and playthings are objects and so on.

Essential and Accidental properties

Another important distinction is between accidental and essential descriptions.

A description of a subject is accidental if it can disappear and the subject still be what it is.

For example:

There will still be rattles if no rattles are blue.
There will still be rattles if no rattles are heavy.
There will still be rattles if no rattles belong to you.

Blueness, heaviness, belonging to you are all accidental properties of rattles.

However, (according to our classification) if there were no toys, then there would be no rattles. Therefore, being a toy is an essential description of a rattle. Similarly, we could add that if there were no things that can be shaken, then there would be no rattles.

Aristotle gives nine examples of accidental properties:

Quantity/size
Qualification (colour, shape)
Its relation to something else
Where it is
When it is
The position it is in
What it has
What it is doing
How it is being affected (by something else)

Tasks

Explain the difference between univocal and equivocal words.
Explain the difference between primary and secondary substances.
Explain the difference between accidental and essential properties
Pick out one item from your pencil case and investigate it using these ideas from Aristotle:
- Produce a system of classification to describe it. What kind of thing is it? What kind of thing is that kind of thing? Etc.
- Describe its essential and accidental features. You should describe at least 4 accidental features using Aristotle’s 9 examples.

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