Re: Categories in Mathematics and Philosophy

Thanks, Graham,

That seems to makes "accuse" something
like "show cause" or "advance a reason".

I vaguely remember -- not having any Greek to speak of ...
but just looking across the page in my old Loeb Classics --
that Aristotle used two words for "predicating something of
something".  One must have been the root of "categorizing",
and it seems like the other was something like "hyparchein"?
I recall getting a vaguely syntactic sense from the former
but a vaguely geometric sense from the later, like it would
have been used in connection with a diagram.  Does that make
any sense at all?

Jon

----

Graham R. Shutt wrote:
 >
 > My apologies about the errors in the previous .html file.
 > A corrected file is attached below.
 >
 > On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Graham R. Shutt wrote:
 >
 >> Dear Jon and John,
 >>
 >> Attached is an .html file containing the definition of katēgoreō
 >> and related words as found in Liddell, Scott, and Jones (1968).
 >>
 >> At first glance, "accuse" would seem to be an unhappy translation
 >> of katēgor- and related forms because of the legal connotations.
 >> The Latin verb accūsō, ~āre [ad- + causa] has built into it,
 >> so to speak, a legal case.  But causa, ~ae may also mean
 >> a causal or metaphysical principle.  Perhaps "categories"
 >> and "principles" are not too far apart.
 >>
 >> Aristotle sometimes uses the expressions "predicate of" and "say of"
 >> in what seem to me interchangeable ways.  For example, "Whenever one
 >> thing is *predicated of* another as of a subject, all things *said of
 >> *what is predicated will be said of the subject also" (Categories 1b10ff;
 >> emphasis added). I suppose that when one "accuses" someone of something,
 >> one is actually "saying" something of that person. But perhaps this is
 >> just "over-active imagining" on my part, too.
 >>
 >> Graham R. SHUTT
 >> URL: grshutt.org

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