Ontological Categories: their Nature and Significance ? Jan Westerhoff

Abstract

This is a welcome discussion of a topic recognized as fundamental throughout the history of philosophy, but seldom accorded book‐length attention. Westerhoff's account of the ontological categories leads him, as he says, ‘on a philosophical Grand Tour’ of ontology (p. 10). Various nooks and crannies are explored – trope theory, situation semantics, structuralist logic, quantification, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Frege's saturated/unsaturated distinction, and much else – though none in detail. It would be impossible here to discuss usefully what the author says about all of them. I shall limit myself to his chief theses, which are important and ably argued. We are reminded at the very beginning that the central cognitive activity is to see and say what something is, and that the term ‘categories’ as used in metaphysics (the author prefers ‘ontology’) stands for the most general and fundamental kinds of things. Aristotle called his enquiry in Metaphysics ‘the science of being qua being’, holding that its first topic is the principles of the ‘syllogism’. But metaphysicians have been concerned mostly with the subject‐matter of Aristotle's earlier work Categories. The difference between the two produced the mediaeval doctrine of the transcendentals, some of which, especially Being and One, clearly belong in the science of being qua being as well as in logic. They are not categories, though Westerhoff and several writers he cites call at least some of them ‘supercategories’. For they range across the categories, which are the summa genera. Westerhoff ignores this mediaeval doctrine, but a distinction between the categories and the transcendentals, which, like Being, are ‘more general’, is essential to any sophisticated theory of categories.