In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1787) presented the first major challenge to Aristotle’s system of categories. In devising his categories, Kant started with the logically possible ways of combining relationships in a proposition of judgment:
There arise exactly the same number of pure concepts of the understanding which apply a priori to objects of intuition in general, as there are logical functions in all possible judgments, because those functions completely specify the understanding and determine all its faculties. Following Aristotle, we shall call these concepts categories, for our primary purpose is the same as his, notwithstanding the great difference in manner of execution.
Kent organized his table of categories, like his table of judgments, in four groups of three:
Quantity: Unity, Plurality, Totality
Quality: Reality，Negation， Limitation
Relation: Inherence, Causality, Community
Modality: Possibility, Existence, Necessity
Kant considered this table a principled framework for organizing the categories, not a rejection of all the work that had been done within Aristotle’s framework.
If one has the original and primitive concepts, it is easy to add the derivative and subsidiary, and thus give a complete picture of the family tree of the pure understanding. Since at present, I am concerned not with the completeness of the system, but only with the principles to be followed, I leave this supplementary work for another occasion. It can easily be carried out with the aid of the ontological manuals, for instance, by placing under the category of causality the predicables of force, activity, passivity; under the category of community the predicables of presence, resistance; among the categories of modality the predicables of origin, extinction, change, etc.
…after two hundered years, his easy task is still unfinished.
