Aristotle’s Categories

Aristotle accepted Plato’s distinction, but reversed the emphasis: he considered the physical world to be the ultimate reality and treated the forms as abstractions derived from sensory experience. In the Categories, the first treatise in his collected works, he presented ten basic categories for classifying anything that may be said or predicated about anything: Substance, Quality, Quatity, Relation, Activity, Passivity, Having, Situatedness, Spatiality, and Temporality. The Tree of Porphyry, which was the first attempt to organize Aristotle’s categories in a hierarchy, shows only the subtypes under Substance. The Viennese philosopher Franz Brentano organized all ten categories as the leaves of a single tree whose branches are labled with other terms taken from Aristotle’s works: Being, Accident, Property, Inherence, Directedness, Containment, Movement, and Intermediacy.