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Container Metaphysics According to Aristotle’s Greek Commentators
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Aristotle’s little treatise the Categories, which stands, of course, at the very beginning of his corpus, presents a range of interpretive problems that are both interesting in themselves and also philosophically instructive. They can be divided into internal problems and external problems. The external problems are difficulties in harmonizing Aristotle’s ideas in the Categories with his later views. The internal ones are those presented by the treatise itself, taken, in so far as that is feasible, in isolation.
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1 To complicate things further, Aristotle uses the word ‘eidos’ for the first kind (8b26) and the word ‘genos’ for the other three (9a14, 9a28, 10all).
2 I am supposing that, in the light of, e.g., 2b37ff, we can understand ‘x is more substance than y’ to mean something like 'x is more strictly called “substance” than y.’
3 Textual citations of the commentators are from these volumes of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (Berlin 1882-1909): Ammonius, [1] IV, 4;Google Scholar Dexippus [1] IV,2; Elias [1] XVIII, 1; Philoponus [I] XIII, 1; Simplicius [1] VIII.
4 It should be noted, however, that Simplicius, who is also thought to have heard Ammonius’s lectures on the Categories, repeats the line about Aristotle’s not saying ‘in which it was’ but ‘in which it is.’ But he then goes on to draw a Dexippus-type moral (49, 14-18).
5 Indeed, if we are to suppose that Aristotle countenanced them, we had better give them an independent motivation. Marc Cohen and I tried to do that in our paper, ‘The One and the Many,’ Review of Metaphysics 21 (1968) 630-55.