Concept
Quality (philosophy)
Overview
distinguishing feature
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Quality (philosophy) is discussed.
Quality may be described as the determinate mode immediate and identical with Being--as distinguished from Quantity (to come afterwards), which, although a mode of Being, is no longer immediately identical with Being, but a mode indifferent and external to it. A Something is what it is in virtue of its quality, and losing its quality it ceases to be what it is. Quality, moreover, is completely a category only of the…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Whereas none of the characteristics I have mentioned are peculiar to quality, the fact that likeness and unlikeness can be predicated with reference to quality only, gives to that category its distinctive feature. One thing is like another only with reference to that in virtue of which it is such and such; thus this forms the peculiar mark of quality. We must not be disturbed because it may be argued that, though…
Aristotle, The Categories
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
3. The whiteness that I see in you is not a quality, but an actualization of the potentiality of whitening. In the intelligible world all the things that we call qualities are actualizations. They are called qualities because they are properties, because they differentiate the beings from each other, because in respect to themselves they bear a particular character. But since quality in the sense-world is also an…
Plotinus, Plotinos
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
the quality, which operates upon the passion, and the subject in which the quality inheres. The quality is the beauty, and the subject is the house, considered as his property or contrivance. Both these parts are essential, nor is the distinction vain and chimerical.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
But this is a means of distinguishing quality and after a discussion of this part of the subject we proceed "Over against the idea of species stands the idea of the whole, a homogeneity, as it were, in which no differentiation of species can longer be found," so we pass from quality to quantity and this is always "capable of measurement." Let us compare this "clear analysis of the actual, universal scheme of things"…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
names the idea; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Quality (philosophy)
Related ideas
- Force
- Philosophy
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- John Locke
- Idea
- Hylomorphism
- Feeling
- Categories (Aristotle)
- Light
- Measurement
- Mass
- Matter
- Holism
- Common sense
- Understanding
- Newton's law of universal gravitation
- Perception
- Robert M. Pirsig
- Romanticism
- Theory of relativity
- Aristotle
- Beauty
- Utility
- Logic
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Ontology.