What is the theory of categories (predicable „things”)? Is it a logical theory? From the historical point of view: it was. Predicable things have some hierarchy (just as with Plato).

Plato: there is just one highest predicable: the Good or Being. Aristotle: I.e., there are ten different sorts of predicables. Half of the sorts are mentioned by interrogatives (how many, how, to what …) We can ask these ten questions about something (a primary substance). E. g.: What is it like? It is white. What is white? A colour, What is a colour? A physical property. What is a physical property? A quality. We have ten such separate hierarchies. Top of the hierarchy: the sort (category) itself. A simple idea: you can’t assert a quality about a quantity.

Priority belongs to substance. If you claim a substance about something, you say what it is – in a special sense. Next chapters: characterisation of the particular categories via quasi-logical tests.

What does Aristotle classify in the Categories? Things – expressions – notions Perhaps all the three. Let us call them terms. Another classification of the predicables: Top. A5 The „five words” (Porphyry) characterise the predicate in relation to the subject. Top. investigates only four: definition, property, accident and genus. At Porphyry, definition is missing, but we have species and difference.

Hermeneutics (De Interpretatione) Foundations of semantics for more than 2000 years. (First task of) semantics: to explain how do we understand each other by using the language.

writing speech thingsmind affection likeness symbol of Two types of explanation I. Aristotle and almost everybody after him till Frege We associate mental entities as meanings to spoken expressions. 1. Background assumption: they are the same in every mind. Characteristic features: 2. There is some similarity between the mental entity and the thing 3. Words are the prior bearers of meaning, sentence meaning is secondary. It is composed from word meanings on some way. Difficulty: negative sentences. Aristotelian epistemology/philosophy of mind supports 1. and 2. Important development in the Middle Ages: mental entities are also signs of things (mental language) and the relation sign-signified entity is transitive.

II. (Stoics, Bolzano, Frege and most philosophers of language after Frege): There are some ideal and objective entities (lekta, Vorstellungen an sich, Sinns) that belong to expressions as meanings. 1.Assumption: somehow we have access to such entities. Characteristic features: 2.The sign-thing and the sign-meaning relations are of different nature (designate vs. express). 3.The primary bearers of meaning are sentences, not words.

The Hermeneutics theory of proposition Statement-making sentence: logos apophantikos

„affirming or denying something of something”: apophansis ti kata tinos é ti apo tinos „something does or does not hold”: huparkhei ti é mé huparkhei huparkhei : holds/belongs to Both formulas are paraphrases of the subject-predicate relation (metalanguage substitutes for the copula)

Ch. 7, theory of the logical square Universal: katholou, particular: kat’hekasta. This is a division of terms. To state universally: another thing Contraries: enantia