The Categories

What kinds of things are there, and what can be said about them? In this short treatise, which opens his works on logic, Aristotle divides everything that can be said into ten categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action and being acted upon. He then discusses opposites, priority and movement, and the difference between individual things, such as a particular horse, and general kinds, such as 'horse'.

The Categories was the first book of Aristotle's Organon, his collection of works on logic, and for nearly two thousand years it was the first book of philosophy studied in Greek, Arabic and Latin schools; it was translated into Arabic in the ninth century and commented on by al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd. This translation is by E. M. Edghill. Read Aristotle's Poetics and Politics.

Aristotle (384–322 BC), the son of a doctor from Stagira in northern Greece, studied at Plato's Academy for twenty years, tutored the young Alexander the Great and then founded his own school in Athens, the Lyceum, where he is said to have taught while walking.

He wrote on almost everything: logic, physics, biology, ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry, and his works became the foundation of learning for two thousand years. In the Arabic tradition he was called the First Teacher, and the great commentaries of Ibn Rushd carried his thought back to medieval Europe.