Concept
Category (Kant)
Overview
In Immanuel Kant's philosophy, a category (German: Categorie in the original or Kategorie in modern German) is a pure concept of the understanding (Verstand). A Kantian category is a characteristic of the appearance of any object in general, before it has been experienced (a priori). Following Aristotle, Kant uses the term categories to describe the "pure concepts of the understanding, which apply to objects of intuition in general a priori…" Kant further wrote about the categories: "They are concepts of an object in general, by means of which its intuition is regarded as determined with regard to one of the logical functions for judgments." The categories are the condition of the possibility of objects in general, not specific objects in particular. Kant enumerated twelve distinct but thematically related categories.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
To ask if a category is true or not, must sound strange to the ordinary mind: for a category apparently becomes true only when it is applied to a given object, and apart from this application it would seem meaningless to inquire into its truth. But this is the very question on which everything turns. We must however in the first place understand clearly what we mean by Truth. In common life truth means the agreement…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Category is; the author is tied to Category in the knowledge graph.
The merely transcendental use of the categories is therefore, in fact, no use at all and has no determined, or even, as regards its form, determinable object. Hence it follows that the pure category is incompetent to establish a synthetical à priori principle, and that the principles of the pure understanding are only of empirical and never of transcendental use, and that beyond the sphere of possible experience no…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Category is; the author is tied to Category in the knowledge graph.
Thirdly, since those things which range under one ἰδέα are also under the cognisance of one science, there would have been, on their theory, only one science taking cognisance of all goods collectively: but in fact there are many even for those which range under one category: for instance, of Opportunity or Seasonableness (which I have before mentioned as being in the category of Time), the science is, in war…
Aristotle, The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle
Names Category several times; the author is tied to Category in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Category (Kant)
Related ideas
- Quality (philosophy)
- Immanuel Kant
- Ancient Greek
- Subjunctive possibility
- Negation
- Contingency (philosophy)
- Infinity
- A System of Logic
- Philosophical pluralism
- Particular
- Potentiality and actuality
- Substance theory
- Modality (semantics)
- Apodicticity
- Time
- Aristotle
- Universal (metaphysics)
- Modal logic
- Critique of Pure Reason
- Causality
- Reality
- Critique of Practical Reason
- A priori and a posteriori
- Quantity
Place in the tradition
Part of Deductive-nomological model.