Categories. On Interpretation

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was one of the greatest thinkers of antiquity, a student of Plato and tutor to Alexander the Great, the founder of the Peripatetic school, the originator of formal logic, and a natural scientist who exerted a profound influence on the development of all Western European philosophy and science. The first treatise in Aristotle’s famous “Organon,” a philosophical work devoted to logic, was “Categories”—one of the philosopher’s earliest works, in which he first identified ten categories through which we understand and describe surrounding reality. This work largely provided the foundation for the study of logic throughout the history of Western philosophy. The collection also includes Porphyry’s “Introduction,” by the ancient Neoplatonist philosopher, which explains all the key concepts of the theory of logic in “Categories,” and Aristotle’s logical treatise “On Interpretation.”