The Categories

The Categories is a text from Aristotle’s Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. They are “perhaps the single most heavily discussed of all Aristotelian notions”. The Categories places every object of human apprehension under one of ten categories (known to medieval writers as the Latin term predicament). Aristotle intended them to enumerate everything that can be expressed without composition or structure, thus anything that can be either the subject or the predicate of a proposition. Later texts by scholastic philosophers also reflect this disparity of treatment.