Abstract

Unlike some of the shorter, introductory commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories, such as those by Porphyry, Dexippus, or Simplicius’s teacher Ammonius, Simplicius’s commentary is, as he himself admits, a lengthy treatise that discusses Aristotle’s text lemma by lemma. As is customary, Simplicius begins his commentary with an introduction that includes two schemata of questions. The first situates the Categories within the larger context of Aristotle’s corpus and identifies the necessary qualities of good students and teachers. The second set of questions focuses specifically on the Categories by addressing the goal of the work, its usefulness, its authenticity, its place within logic, the reason for its title, and its division into chapters. Most important in this introductory section is Simplicius’s discussion of the goal of Aristotle in writing the Categories, for at the time there was widespread disagreement as to whether the Categories is a work about words only, about things only, about concepts only, or somehow about all three. Of course, like many of the medievals who studied his commentary, Simplicius argues that it is about all three and contends that the goal “would be about the simple and most generic parts of speech which signify simple realities, and the simple notions which exist in conjunction with these simple realities”.