Ontological Categories
Ontological categories are the most general kinds into which everything that exists is supposed to fall. This topic studies which categories are fundamental and how the system of categories is to be organized.
Definition
A category ontology partitions all beings into a small set of irreducible highest kinds and specifies the relations among them.
Scope
Covers Aristotle's ten categories, the substance-attribute distinction, the contrast between particulars and universals as a category scheme, Lowe's four-category ontology, and metaphysical debates over what makes a category fundamental or exhaustive.
Core questions
- What are the most fundamental kinds of being?
- Is there a privileged, exhaustive list of categories?
- What distinguishes a substance from a property or relation?
- What makes one category more fundamental than another?
Key concepts
- Substance
- Attribute
- Particular
- Universal
- Highest kind
- Instantiation
- Fundamentality
Key theories
- Aristotelian categories
- Aristotle distinguished ten categories headed by substance, with quantity, quality, relation, place, time and others as accidents that depend on substances for their being.
- Four-category ontology
- Lowe organizes reality along two distinctions, particular versus universal and substantial versus non-substantial, yielding objects, kinds, modes, and attributes, with characterization and instantiation as the linking relations.
History
Aristotle's Categories and Metaphysics founded the project of classifying being into highest kinds. Kant transposed categories into forms of the understanding. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century analytic metaphysicians, including Lowe and Westerhoff, revived the question of what categories there are and what grounds a category system.
Debates
- Is there a uniquely correct system of categories?
- Realists hold the world has a determinate category structure to be discovered; others argue category schemes are partly conventional or relative to a conceptual framework.
Key figures
- Aristotle
- Immanuel Kant
- Franz Brentano
- E. J. Lowe
- Jan Westerhoff
Related topics
Seminal works
- aristotleCategories
- lowe2006
Frequently asked questions
- Why do philosophers want a list of categories?
- A category scheme aims to give the most general inventory of what there is, providing a framework within which more specific metaphysical and scientific claims can be located and assessed.