Habent sua fata libelli: Aristotle's Categories in the first ce

Why did the study of Aristotle’s work known to us as the Categories become such a major concern from the first century BC onwards? Hans Gottschalk comments: “It would be interesting to know why the Categories came to exercise so much fascination, but there is no evidence.” Perhaps, however, an examination of some aspects of the interest taken in the work, in so far as our fragmentary evidence allows, and of the historical context, may at least lead to informed speculation; and that is the purpose of this paper. First, though, more needs to be said about the background to the question and about its importance. The attention given to Aristotle’s Categories in antiquity had major consequences for the future direction of philosophy. The prominence in subsequent discussion of the problem of universals, and more generally of questions concerning the relation between being, knowledge and language, is due in large part to the Categories coming in antiquity to occupy the place it did at the start of the philosophical curriculum. This has also affected approaches to Aristotle himself. Marwan Rashed has shown how Alexander of Aphrodisias, by reading the Metaphysics and De anima with an eye to the Organon rather than to the biological works, gave the study of Aristotle a particular slant which it has retained almost till the present day; and Arthur Madigan has commented that “Alexander reads the Metaphysics in the light of the Categories rather than vice versa”. If one compares the place occupied by such issues from late antiquity to the present day with what we find in Aristotle’s immediate Hellenistic successors, one is struck by the contrast. Questions of form and substance, of how forms and in particular souls relate to form-matter compounds, are conspicuous by their relative absence. Theophrastus and Eudemus wrote works entitled Categories, but we have no knowledge of their content. They do make reference to the Aristotelian categories, for example in connection with the theory of motion, but this reflects Aristotle’s own discussion in his Physics. In some passages,