The Categories and Analytic Philosophy

This article discusses the reception of Aristotle’s Categories within the analytic tradition, i.e., roughly, among the strand of philosophy based on conceptual rigour and the careful analysis of specific problems even independently of the examination of particular texts or authors - an approach that stemmed from the work of, among others, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Generally speaking, one can distinguish two attitudes of recent and contemporary analytic philosophers towards the Categories: one more – but not purely – historically oriented, the other more theoretical. A first camp, exemplifying the former approach, includes authors who contributed to the interpretation and discussion of the Categories, looking at it primarily as an object of study in itself – albeit with a view to answering questions of an essentially theoretical nature. These questions concern, for example, the assumptions underlying the text of the Categories, the correct methodology to be used for the identification of categories, and the nature of the categories themselves. The second group comprises instead those philosophers who, either in continuity or in some degree of contrast with the Aristotelian views on the matter, put forward novel systems of categories, made reflections on the key Aristotelian notion of ‘ways of being’, i.e., the idea that Being is not a monolithic entity corresponding to a univocal concept, and/or embarked on an in depth examination of one or more of the Aristotelian categories. Clearly, a discussion of the reception of the Categories among recent analytic philosophers ought to take both approaches into account. The structure of this article is, therefore, the following. A brief introduction will outline the basic historical and methodological aspects of the analytic tradition in philosophy and its general connection to Aristotle. Next, the interpretation of the Categories proposed by some authors who can be said to qualify as ‘analytic philosophers’ – or, at any rate, to be directly relevant to the analytic tradition in philosophy - will be presented. In direct relation to this, the views of analytic philosophers on the correct methodology for uncovering or defining ontological categories will be discussed, as well as on the issue of realism or antirealism about categories. After that, more or less recent attempts to put forward categorial systems roughly in the spirit of Aristotle will be looked at. Lastly, we will explore some more general themes, more loosely related to the Categories and relevant in connection to the recent resurgence of what can be labelled the ‘neo-Aristotelian’ approach in analytic metaphysics. On the one hand, the issue of the univocity or plurality of Being; on the other hand, metaphysics intended as the study of the structure of reality on the basis of notions – such as grounding and dependence – which aim to capture not what exists, but how entities belonging to various categories ‘exist together’. A short concluding summary will follow.