katêgoríai: acusações, predicações, categorias, praedicamenta, summa genera (scil. entis). Plural: kategoríai (hai). Latim: praedicamentum (plural: praedicamenta). Um dos modos do ser, uma maneira de ser do ser. Vem do verbo kategoréo, afirmo.
Sorabji
Aristotle’s Categories recognises ten categories of things: substance, quantity, relative, quality, acting, being acted on, position or posture, when, where, having on (or wearing). C.M. Gillespie has plausibly suggested that these categories were arrived at by Aristotle’s taking as an example of substance one of the students in his class and asking what could be predicated of that student. He has a certain quantity, being six foot tall, certain relations, such as being to the right of another student, certain qualities like being fair-skinned, and so on. On this view, the list of ten was arrived at conversationally and casually. But the Neoplatonist commentators took the list as a definitive guide to the whole of Aristotle’s work. They therefore asked far more philosophical questions about it than we may be inclined to, questions about how it can serve as such a guide.
It is noteworthy that Aristotle’s ten categories, like his four causes, or modes of explanation, are presented without argument. In each case, Aristotle is saying, ‘see it like this’. It is one of the functions of a great philosopher to show us how to imagine things differently. The arguments come later, in discussing the advantages or disadvantages of the scheme, or defending it from attack. If we confined ourselves to studying the arguments of the philosophers, we should miss much that was important.
Aristotle’s Categories was the battleground where his future role in the curriculum of the West was fought. The earliest commentaries from that of Andronicus in the first century BC had focused above all on the Categories. And the work had not only been defended, but also attacked (see Gottschalk), e.g. by the Stoics Cornutus and Athenodorus and with particular ferocity by the Platonists Lucius and Nicos-tratus, who wrote not commentaries, but simply attacks on the Categories. So Plotinus in the third century AD had plenty of ammunition to draw from if he wanted to attack Aristotle’s Categories. And on the standard view, he did mount an attack which could well have been decisive. In Enneads 6.1 (42) Plotinus urges the inability of the Categories to represent the intelligible as well as the sensible world. What he seeks to put in place of the categories for describing the intelligible world in 6.2 (43) is the five great kinds of Plato’s Sophist. But in 6.3 (44), Plotinus turns to describing the sensible world and after all concedes some role to four of Aristotle’s ten categories, substance, quantity, quality and relative, and to a fifth of his own, change, but still with many criticisms and qualifications which extend throughout the tract, as he discusses these five categories one by one. I shall not in the narrative always repeat the number in square brackets, which gives Plotinus’ chronological order of composition, where it would be unduly repetitive, as it would be for these three Enneads in Chapter 3. (SorabjiPC3:56)
Armstrong
VI. 2. 8
(Armstrong Selection and Translation from the Enneads)
(How we discover the five categories applicable to the intelligible world, Being, Motion, Rest, Sameness, and Otherness. Plotinus explains what we mean when we apply these predicates to Noûs.)
Observe Noûs in its purity. Look upon it with concentrated gaze, not with these bodily eyes. You see the hearth of being and a sleepless light on it; you see how beings rest in it and are distinct and all together; you see abiding life and a thought whose activity is not directed towards the future but towards the present, or rather the perpetual present, the everlasting now, a thought thinking in itself and not outside. In its thinking there is activity and motion, in its thinking itself, substance and being. Existing, it thinks itself as existent and the being on which it is, so to speak, founded. Its self-directed activity is not substance, but being is that to which the activity is directed and from which it comes. That which it looks at is being, not its look: but the look too possesses being, because it comes from and is directed to being. And since it is an act, not in potency, it gathers the two (being and thought) together again and does not separate them, but makes itself being and being itself. Being is the most firmly set of all things and that about which all other things have established their rest; it has a rest which does not come to it from outside but is from itself and in itself. It is that in which thought comes to a stop, though thought is a rest which has no beginning, and from which it starts, though thought is a rest which never started: for movement does not begin from or end in movement. Again, the Form at rest is the defining limit of intelligence, and intelligence is the motion of the Form, so that all are one; movement and rest are one, and are all-pervading kinds; and each subsequent thing is a particular being, a particular rest, and a particular motion.
Now when anyone sees these three, having come into intuitive contact with the nature of being, he sees being by the being in himself and the others, motion and rest, by the motion and rest, in himself, and fits his own being, motion, and rest to those in Noûs: they come to him together in a sort of confusion and he mingles them without distinguishing them; then as it were separating them a little and holding them away from him and distinguishing them he perceives being, motion, and rest, three and each of them one. Does he not then say that they are different from each other and distinguish them in otherness, and see the otherness in being when he posits three terms, each of them one? Again, when he brings them back to unity and sees them in a unity, all one, does he not collect them into sameness and, as he looks at them, see that sameness has come to be and is? So we must add these two, the same and the other, to those first three, so that there will be in all five kinds: the last two give to subsequent things the characters of being other and same; for each individual thing is a particular ‘ same’ and a particular ‘other’; (‘same’ and ‘other’ without the ‘particular’ apply to the universal kinds). These are primary kinds, because you cannot apply any predicate to them which forms part of the definition of their essence. You will certainly predicate being of them, for they exist, but not as their genus or kind, for they are not particular beings; nor can you predicate being as the genus of motion and rest, for they are not species of being. (Some things exist as species of being, others as participating in being.) Nor does being participate in these other primary kinds as if they were genera of which it was a species, for they do not rise to the level of being and are not prior to it.
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