ABSTRACT
The temporal relation of the two ways of partitioning does seem to fit the accepted order of Aristotle's works. The accidental, or the incidental, designates the indefinite set of properties that are true of an individual which cannot be deduced from the essence of its species or an account of individual identity. In the little work Categories, which was placed by editors at the beginning of the corpus, Aristotle presents ten concepts that have occasioned great controversy among interpreters. They obviously constitute a partitioning of being into ten parts, but precisely what is partitioned depends on the different approaches to being itself. A more general path would be to take the categories as a set of concepts developed out of the different philosophical and scientific interests Aristotle was pursuing. Aristotle moves on from the indeterminate in meaning to face the question of the indeterminate in existence and the possibility of true assertion about existence.
