Categories of Being

They're a thing >> CATEGORIES OF BEING

The process of abstraction required to discover the number and names of the categories has been undertaken by many philosophers since Aristotle and involves the careful inspection of each concept to ensure that there is no higher category or categories under which that concept could be subsumed. The scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries developed Aristotle's ideas, firstly, for example by Gilbert of Poitiers, dividing Aristotle's ten categories into two sets, primary and secondary, according to whether they inhere in the subject or not:

• Primary categories: Substance, Relation, Quantity and Quality
• Secondary categories: Place, Time, Situation, Condition, Action, Passion