ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses on General Meaning of Categories; Plato's Ideas or Forms; Aristotle's Categories; Kant's Categories; Hegel's Dialectic; More Recent Treatments of the Categories. Aristotle, reflecting on such assertions, enumerated what he called the categories-the various kinds of assertion that may be made about any object. It is not obvious that Plato's conception of Ideas or Forms, which appears to have been suggested by the Pythagorean doctrine of Numbers or mathematical determinations, is always clear and consistent. Kant criticized the categories of Aristotle as being redundant and not arranged on any definite principle, and also on some other grounds that are less convincing. Causation becomes schematized as a uniform mode of sequence. Number and Degree seem to have as good a right to be regarded as fundamental conceptions as any of those that he describes as categories. Hence it takes as the fundamental categories Qualitative Conceptions, Quantitative Conceptions, Causation, and Systematic Unity.
