Led by Boethius Simulacrum
About this course
Module 2 ended with the Tree of Porphyry and a question at its head: is there a single highest genus, or several? The tradition's answer is ten.
The text is Aristotle's Categories, the first book of the Organon — which Boethius translated, commented on twice, and thereby handed to the Latin West as the beginning of logic for six hundred years. Porphyry's Isagoge was written as a preface to it, so you have just read the introduction and now read the book.
Everything that can be said is said in one of ten ways. Not ten kinds of thing — ten kinds of saying: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, passion. And the first is not one among ten. Substance is prior, and the other nine are said of substances. There are substances, and then there are the ways substances are.
The practical payoff is a diagnosis you cannot make without it. A category error is not a falsehood. To ask what colour the number seven is is not to be mistaken about seven's colour, as one might be mistaken about a door's. Seven has no colour, and the question has no answer — not a hidden one, none. That makes category error a distinct species of mistake alongside falsity and invalidity, and a student who can only sort statements into true and false is missing a whole diagnostic category.
Two warnings. The ten are not a classification of objects — Socrates is a substance and six feet and pale and Plato's teacher, all at once. And the list is a proposal, not a datum: it has been disputed since antiquity, Kant reworked it entirely, and the objection that it tracks the question-words of Greek rather than the joints of the world has real force. A student who cannot say why someone might reject the list has learned it as furniture rather than as a claim.
Taught in English; sources quoted in Latin and Greek.
Led by Boethius Simulacrum
The question
Seven sittings. You begin below the ten, with Aristotle's fourfold
Outcome
The student can assign any predicate to its category, distinguish
Sub-units
Practice scenarios
A tribunal must decide whether a corporation can be said to have acted *recklessly*. Counsel for one side argues that recklessness is a state of mind and a corporation has no mind, so the question is not merely unproven but meaningless. Counsel for the other argues that corporations are routinely said to decide, intend, know and fail, and that the objection would dissolve most of commercial law. The tribunal has asked for help distinguishing the two claims.
Your goals