Philosophy 3260 Study Questions: Aristotle’s Categories
1. What is the difference between things that are said involving combination and
things that are said without combination?
2. What does Aristotle mean by ‘in a subject’?
3. What things are not said of any subject?
4. What is it for one thing to be predicated of another?
5. Give three examples of things that are signified by things said ‘without
combination’.
6. What is Aristotle’s first criterion for being a substance?
7. What are secondary substances?
8. Why is the definition of ‘white’ never predicated of a (white) body?
9. In what sense does Aristotle claim here that primary substances are first in the
‘order of being’?
10. Explain Aristotle’s hierarchy of substances (what is more and what is less of a
substance)? What is the basis of this hierarchy?
11. What substances (primary and secondary) must be regarded as equally
substances?
12. Why does Aristotle deny that substances can be in a subject?
13. What does Aristotle mean by a ‘synonymous thing’?
14. What does a substance ‘seem to signify’?
15. What is the difference between a secondary substance and a term like ‘white’?
(Hint: it has to do with qualification & its relation to a (primary) substance.)
16. What does Aristotle mean when he says that substance does not admit of a more
and a less?
17. What seems ‘most distinctive’ of substance?
18. How does Aristotle argue that this distinction does not apply to beliefs or
statements, despite the fact that it seems to?