Aristotle's Categories can easily seem to be a statement of a naïve,
pre-philosophical ontology, centered around ordinary items.
Wolfgang-Rainer Mann argues that the treatise, in fact, presents a
revolutionary metaphysical picture, one Aristotle arrives at by
(implicitly) criticizing Plato and Plato's strange counterparts, the
"Late-Learners" of the Sophist. As Mann shows, the Categories reflects
Aristotle's discovery that ordinary items are things (objects with
properties). Put most starkly, Mann contends that there were no things
before Aristotle.
The author's argument consists of two main elements. First, a careful
investigation of Plato which aims to make sense of the odd-sounding
suggestion that things do not show up as things in his ontology.
Secondly, an exposition of the theoretical apparatus Aristotle
introduces in the Categories--an exposition which shows how Plato's
and the Late-Learners' metaphysical pictures cannot help but seem
inadequate in light of that apparatus. In doing so, Mann reveals that
Aristotle's conception of things--now so engrained in Western thought as
to seem a natural expression of common sense--was really a hard-won
philosophical achievement.
Clear, subtle, and rigorously argued, The Discovery of Things will
reshape our understanding of some of Aristotle's--and Plato's--most
basic ideas.
