Categories — Fundamental concepts or modes of being and predication—the supreme genera under which everything that can be said or thought is ordered. The term comes from the Greek katēgoria, meaning “predication” or “attribution,” derived from katēgorein (to predicate, to accuse). In his work Categories, Aristotle listed ten: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, action, and passion. Among them, substance (ousía) holds primacy, for it designates that which exists in itself, while the others are determinations said of a substance—for example, “Socrates” (substance) is “white” (quality), “in the Lyceum” (place), “yesterday” (time). The categories are thus the irreducible ways of attributing a predicate to a subject. Kant profoundly reworks the concept in the Critique of Pure Reason: categories cease to be modes of being and become pure concepts of the understanding, a priori structures that the mind imposes on the manifold of sensibility to constitute objects of experience. He sets out twelve categories grouped into four classes—quantity, quality, relation, and modality—among them causality, substance, unity, and plurality. Hence his famous formula: thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind; without categories, sensory data would remain unintelligible, and without intuitions the categories would have nothing to order. The concept thus connects with the notions of substance, of predication, and, in Kant, of judgment, from which the table of categories is derived.
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