Abstract

The word ‘category’ is commonly used as a virtual synonym for such words as ‘class’, ‘genus’, ‘type’, and ‘kind’, but in Western philosophy since Aristotle ‘category’ has had a technical use that associates it with the foundations of philosophy. Categories in this philosophical sense are not determined by empirical procedures of classification, whether those of common sense or of science. They are determined by the very conditions that determine a philosophy, and since Kant the method of determining them is often called “transcendental argument.”