Aristotle, Grammar, and Reality (Part 3.)
Porphyry: On Aristotle Categories (Ancient Commentators on Aristotle) NIPPOD Edition
After reading Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation, I decided I should read a commentary on one or both texts. I wasn’t aware of any commentary on these texts written by the Angelic Doctor (although I have recently learned there is one for On Interpretation, which was begun by St. Thomas and finished by Cardinal Cajetan.) I decided to go outre and pick up the one on Categories by the third-century pagan (and anti-Christian) Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry of Tyre.
I had assumed that reading Porphyry would be a difficult slog. To the contrary, Porphyry’s commentary was accessible and entertaining.[1] The commentary is written as a dialogue between Porphyry and a hypothetical student. This framework allows Porphyry to flag where he is going in nice bite-size pieces. The “student” contribution is usually along the lines of “you have explained this very well,” but occasionally, the student challenges Porphyry on some topic. If the reader is following, the “student” becomes a quasi-character to access the narrative.
Porphyry is a fascinating historical figure. He was born in 234 AD and died in 305 AD., the year of Diocletian’s abdication of the imperial throne, an event that would lead in short order to the Christian hegemony over the Roman empire. During Porphyry’s lifetime, Christianity became a powerful challenge to the hegemony of paganism. He was alive during Diocletian’s persecution of Christianity and died about ten years before Constantine took control of the Roman empire.
Porphyry has a reputation as a very effective critic of Christianity. His criticism relied on (a) his knowledge of the Old Testament and (b) his insight that Christianity depended on the Old Testament.[2] He was an astute literary critic. One of his accomplishments was determining that the Book of Daniel had been written in the second-century BC rather than in the sixth-century BC. As such, the “prophecies” of Daniel were debunked as mere history. Porphyry’s anti-Christian works were largely destroyed during the reign of Constantine, but extracts survived in Christian rebuttals. For example, Book 19 of Augustine’s City of God is structured around a rebuttal of Porphyry’s “Against the Christians.” Augustine described Porphyry as the “most learned of philosophers, although one of the fiercest enemies of Christians.”
Porphyry was a disciple of the Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus. Porphyry collected Plotinus’s writings into the Enneads, which are well-known to students of classic philosophy. Porphyry lived an ascetic lifestyle. Historian Robert Louis Wilken points out that becoming a philosopher involved a conversion process whereby a lifestyle of asceticism and virtue was adopted. In that regard, it seems Christianity and philosophy had much in common.
In his commentary on the Categories, Porphyry casually deals with the conflict between Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle made particular things primary instances of being; Plato made universal things primary. Porphyry deals with this conflict by treating Aristotle’s focus on the particular as a focus on words. Porphyry can thereby ignore Aristotle’s contradictory ontological focus as a matter of grammar. (P 74.)
Reading this commentary allowed me to have a second look at the Categories. Porphyry follows Categories closely but pays attention to some details that went past me on the first read. Many of the details were present in the Categories, but Porphyry’s treatment brought those details into focus.
For example, I had not considered the title's significance, i.e., “Categories.” I assumed that “Category” referred to the ten classes Aristotle defined for nouns and predicates. However, “kategoria” denotes the speech the prosecution gives against someone at trial, which is opposed by the defendant’s address (the “apologia.”) Porphyry argues that Aristotle “chose to call those utterances in which significant expressions are applied to things “predications” (kategoria).” A predication is a “simpler significant (signifying(?)) expression is employed and said of what it signifies,” such as pointing to a stone and saying “this.” So, “category” means “predication” and comes from the prosecutor’s speech where the prosecutor points to the defendant, so to speak, and predicates various things about him.[3]
For Porphyry, the ten categories are about words, which are, in turn, about things. (“pragmata.”) “Beings are comprehended by the ten generic differentiae.” (p. 34.) “Words are like messengers that report to us about things, and they get their generic differentiae from things about which they report.” (p. 35.) Words are divided into nouns and verbs. Nouns are things; verbs contain an element of time and are about nouns.
Words can also be defined by comparing and contrasting their sounds and definitions into Homonyms, Synonyms, Paronyms, and Heteronyms. These terms become important later when Porphyry discusses the nine categories of “accidents.” Their differences can be diagrammed as follows:
“Common” is a homonym since it can mean something divisible into parts or a thing used by several people without division. “Ajax, son of Telamon” and “Ajax, son of Oeleus” both have the name Ajax in common, but the term “Ajax” has different definitions in both cases. Another kind of homonym involves a picture and the subject of the picture. We can point to King Charles and a painting of King Charles and say, “that is King Charles.”
Polyonyms have multiple words for a single meaning, e.g., sword, blade, saber, etc.
Paronyms get their names from a word but use a different grammatical ending, e.g., grammar, grammarian.
Synonyms have a common definition, albeit the definition may not be obvious. Porphyry calls “man” and “ox” synonyms insofar as they are both animals.
Porphyry moves on to the “said of or found in” distinction. His treatment of this is far clearer than Aristotle's. Porphyry explicitly defines those things that are “found in” a subject as “accidents and those things “said of” as universals. Thus, we get a diagram of the “four categories” based on accidents and universals:
The next subject is “differentiae.” Differentiae differ in genus, e.g., the difference between having two and four feet for animals.” Differentiae are predicated of several different things that constitute a species. (P. 67.)
This takes the reader to the “ten ultimate categories” and the genera, species, and genus of each.
“Substance” is the single highest genus of substances. Nothing is prior to substance. The remaining nine categories are accidents that exist parasitically on substance. (p. 77, 78.) There are no contradictories/contraries in the genus of substance. Substances are receptive of characteristics (Accidents) that are receptive of contradiction or contraries (and affected by the contraries, e.g., Socrates is sick/healthy. (p. 91.) There is nothing intermediate between substances and accidents. (p. 87, 89.)
The nine remaining categories are divided by Aristotle as follows:
“Of things said without any combination, each signifies, either substance or quantity or qualification or relative or where or when or position or having or doing or being affected.” (p. 73; 1b27–8.)
Porphyry discusses the categories in terms of “proprium” and “differentiae.” The nine categories are not susceptible of definition, but they can be classed by “proprium” which are attributes common to a category and only to that category. (p. 91.) Following his methods, Porphyry develops the following points that I’ve organized into a grid:
Porphyry describes the Categories as a beginning text in the class of logic. There is plenty of logical conundrums here. For example, knowledge is a Relation because there has to be someone with knowledge and some knowledge to be known. Some philosophers distinguished between general knowledge as a relation and specific knowledge as a quality. If that is unconvincing, Porphyry allows that knowledge could be both.
Likewise, perception is a Relation since there must be a perceiver and something perceived. The perceived is prior in this Relation since the perceived will exist without a perceiver, but one cannot be a perceiver without the perceived.
And that sounds like an answer to the question of the tree falling in the forest without someone to hear it.
Philosophy can be practical.
“Everything’s coming up Porphyry” Update:
It must be that phenomenon where you start noticing things once they get called to your attention.
Several days after I put up this review, I was reading a book on the modern debunking of the “Documentary Hypotheses” when Porphyry received a shout-out for anticipating modern scholarship by 1,500 years:
The most serious challenge to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch from antiquity came from the Roman Neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry. Porphyry’s challenges were the most serious to date and the most direct. Unlike other critics of Judaism and Christianity of the time, Porphyry made careful study of the Bible. He gathered together all of the arguments against the Bible he could find from Gnostic, Marcionite, Manichaean, and other sources. It should come as no surprise that after 361, when the Roman Emperor Julian took control of the Roman Empire, he borrowed his major arguments against Christianity from Porphyry. One of Porphyry’s main points of attack was to detail the portions of Genesis he found to be absurd. Porphyry went further than many other critics of the time in maintaining that the entire Pentateuch was composed over one thousand years after Moses by the scribe Ezra.
Bergsma, John; Morrow, Jeffrey. Murmuring Against Moses: The Contentious History and Contested Future of Pentateuchal Studies (p. 274). Emmaus Academic. Kindle Edition.
Porphyry was probably wrong, but he shares that distinction with most Bible Studies Scholars teaching in universities over the last two centuries.
Footnotes:
[1] “Entertaining” if you have read Categories and are interested in how that text can be spun in occasionally surprising directions by another thinker. It is not a thriller or romance.
[2] See Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans saw Them. Wilkens’ book is a first-rate examination of the Roman perspective, criticism, and concerns about Christianity during the first three centuries of Christianity.
[3] Etymology online notes the development of “category” from “predication” and, ultimately, from proto-Indo-European terms for “gathering.” Agora is related to Category as a “gathering place.”
