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Reading Aristotle's Categories

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Reading Aristotle's Categories READING ARISTOTLE’S CATEGORIES AS AN INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC: LATER MEDIEVAL DISCUSSIONS ABOUT ITS PLACE IN THE ARISTOTELIAN CORPUS Giorgio Pini Some trends in the history of philosophy are so well established that, even when it is fi nally acknowledged that they originated from a one- sided and somehow fanciful reconstruction of the events, it may still be diffi cult to appreciate all the consequences of this discovery and rearrange our views accordingly. The place and role of the Categories in the Aristotelian corpus is a particularly good example. We are so used to fi nding the Categories as the fi rst work in any collection of Aristotle’s works that we may take this fact for granted and not pay particular attention to it. As a consequence, we may still be secretly infl uenced by the very specifi c interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy that this apparently innocent ordering conveys. In that case, we would be just the last in a very long series of readers assuming the place of the Categories as uncontroversial. For several centuries, generations of fresh- men started their philosophical training by reading this short treatise together with its companion work, Porphyry’s Introduction to the Categories. The position of the Categories as the fi rst work in Aristotle’s collection of logical writings, the so-called Organon, which was in turn posited at the beginning of the whole Aristotelian corpus, greatly contributed to its enormous success. As it happens, this short treatise (only 15 pages in Bekker ’s edition) was the only philosophical treatise that has been uninterruptedly read, studied and commented on since Antiquity. No other single work had a comparable infl uence in Western philosophy.1 It is a well-known fact in ancient philosophy, however, that the very notion of the Organon owes nothing to Aristotle’s intentions. By now, 1 M. Frede , “The Title, Unity, and Authenticity of the Aristotelian Categories,” in Id., Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford, 1987), pp. 11–28: 11; J. Brunschwig , “Aristote de Stagire. L’Organon: tradition grecque,” in Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques, vol. 1 (Paris, 1989), pp. 482–502: 492: “Placées par la tradition en tête du corpus aristotélicien, les Catégories ont été parmi les textes les plus lus, recopiés, étudiés, traduits et commentés de toute l’histoire de la philosophie.” 146 giorgio pini scholars have shed some light on the philosophical signifi cance of the order in which Aristotle’s writings have come down to us. It is now clear that the prominent position the Categories was made to occupy in the Aristotelian corpus is the result of a systematic interpretation of Aristotle’s writings which is likely to have taken shape in the Neoplatonic circles between the third and fi fth centuries A.D. and whose remote origins may possibly be traced to the Hellenistic period, when some of Aristotle’s interpreters came to read their master’s writings in the light of Stoic doctrines. As a result of this interpretation, the Categories was seen as a work of logic dealing with the simple terms out of which propositions are made. Again, we are so used to such a conception that we may forget how odd this interpretation may have sounded to Aristotle’s very fi rst readers and to Aristotle himself. For sure, it should sound quite odd now to us, in the light of contemporary scholarship. For considering the Categories as a work of logic is an awkward view, one that surely requires some justifi cation and that, on the face of it, is very likely to be wrong. All the same, that was the way in which the Categories was interpreted up to some decades ago. What is the philosophical interest of all this? Because of some his- torical accident, Aristotle’s Categories was considered as a work of logic and was posited at the beginning of Aristotle’s corpus. This did not refl ect Aristotle’s intention but the willingness of his editors to present Aristotle’s thought according to a plan that was originally extrane- ous to him. But one may ask: does this change anything as far as the philosophical interpretation of the Categories is concerned? One may suspect that the way the Categories was presented in ancient, medieval and modern editions, interesting as it may be, is nothing more than an historical accident of no concern for the evaluation of the argu- ments contained in either the Categories or the immense philosophical production that developed around and out of Aristotle’s treatise. In this paper, it is my intention to show that, even from a purely philosophi- cal point of view, it is important to evaluate the place assigned to the Categories in the Aristotelian corpus. For one thing, the assessment of the arguments present in the Categories depends on the role that it is supposed to play in the Aristotelian system. If the Categories is considered as a work of logic—and as such it is given the opening place in the Aristotelian corpus—, then the statements and arguments it contains must be assessed in the light of what logic is taken to be. This means that what generations of interpreters during the Middle Ages read in the Categories was not intended to be (and consequently should not .
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