RSS
Home
Predication in Aristotle's Categories
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
The School of Athens by Raphael taken January 2008
Last time when discussing Aristotle’s Categories we described the different ways in which we refer to things, that is equivocally, univocally, and derivatively. Today we are going to continue on that vein and talk about predication. Predication is to state something as a characteristic of another thing. For example, if I were to say that an apple is red, then the redness is predicated to apple. For Aristotle, there are four different ways in which we predicate things:
- Something can be said of the subject without being in the subject. For example, we can say that man is predicated to the individual man, but that is not to say that the individual man is in man.
- Something can be in a subject without being predicated of the subject. For example, we can say that whiteness is in paper, but we cannot say that whiteness is a type of paper.
- Something can be both in a subject and predicated of a subject. For example, we can say grammar is in us as a subject, and that grammar as a set of rules can be predicated to something else.
- Some things can neither be in a subject nor predicated of a subject. These are usually instances of particular things and not things in general. For example, Mr. Smith is individual thing and therefore cannot be said to be in a subject nor predicated of a subject.
Read Aristotle Online: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/categories.html
More About:
Aristotle
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
It is often assumed that the two contrary lines of thought maintained after the Kantian philosophic revolution, modern idealism and realism, have …
It is the peculiar nature of modern man to assume progress through time. That is not to say that when progress occurs it is not in time, that would be …
