Predicables and categories

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521226059.007

5 - Predicables and categories

from III - The old logic

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

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Jan Pinborg and

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Summary

Aristotle, Porphyry, and the old logic

Prominent among the antecedents of medieval philosophy, particularly of logic and philosophy of language, are two logical works of Aristotle's. His De interpretatione and Categories, as transmitted by Boethius and coloured by Porphyry's introduction (Isagoge) to the Categories, endowed the logica vetus with a substantial inheritance of technical terms and the metaphysical puzzles that go with them. An explanation of this inheritance requires a brief excursion into the history of the terminology central to the Isagoge and the Categories.

The terminology of the Isagoge and the Categories

Aristotle developed two loosely linked doctrines regarding the structure of propositions; one is that of the predicables, the other that of the categories (or predicaments). Chapters 4, 5, and 8 of Book I of Aristotle's Topics contain an account of the predicables definition, property, genus, differentia, and accident. A definition is a phrase signifying a thing's essence. A property is a predicate not indicating a thing's essence but predicable convertibly of it since it belongs to that thing alone; e.g., the capacity for literacy belongs exclusively to man, so that anything that has that capacity is a man, and only a man has that capacity. A genus is predicated essentially of diverse sorts of things; e.g., animal of man, ox, horse, and so forth. A differentia in combination with the genus produces the definition, as when mortal rational is added to animal to produce the definition of man.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy
From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600
, pp. 128 - 142

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521226059.007 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1982

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