The most universal concepts or ideas, the ultimate genera (the set of species), more freely – the general ideas through which one understands aspects of reality or some princes of experience.
In the history of Western philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Peirce have paid considerable attention to the doctrine of categories.
Since Aristotle‘s list of categories is closest to common sense, it serves well as an illustration.
Aristotle‘s categories are: substance, quantity, quality, attitude, place, time, position, state, action, and affect (passion). For Aristotle, everything could fall into one of these categories (for example, kinship belongs to the category of relationships, weight to that of quantity, and “yesterday” to that of time).
In Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant criticizes Aristotle‘s categories, calling them pure rhapsody, because Aristotle (at least according to his detailed description) says too little about how he derived these categories or why he elevated these concepts to the status of categories.
Beginning with Kant, such problems of separation and categorization have been at the heart of virtually all thinkers who have touched on the subject.
