Modern commentators recognize the irony of Aristotle’s Categories becoming a central text for Platonic schools. For similar reasons, these commentators would perhaps be surprised to see Aquinas’s In VII Metaphysics, where he apparently identifies the secondary substance of Aristotle’s Categories with a false Platonic sense of “substance” as if, for Aristotle, only Platonists would say secondary substances are substances. This passage in Aquinas’s commentary has led Mgr. Wippel to claim that, for Aquinas, secondary substance and essence are not the same (...) thing and that Aristotle’s notion of essence is absent from the Categories. This paper—by closely analyzing the apparently contradictory divisions of “substance” in Aquinas’s In V and VII Metaphysics—shows that essence and secondary substance are not altogether distinct for Aquinas. Moreover, when the Categories is viewed by Aquinas as a work of logic, it is found largely to cut across the disputes between Platonism and Aristotelianism. (shrink)

La “relación” en Tomás de Aquino es una de las “categorías” aristotélicas que representan “accidentes”. No obstante, tal compromiso metafísico conlleva algunas dificultades ya que el esquema “sustancia”-“accidentes” no deja lugar a la idea de un “término medio” entre dos cosas. En este artículo presento algunas tensiones entre la sistematización de la “relación” como categoría en Tomás de Aquino y su posición sobre el “estatus” de los predicamentos en general. Para ello analizo primero la deducción de las categorías tal como (...) es presentada por el autor para luego abordar la “relación” de modo sistemático. En esta exposición argumento que Tomás tiene severas dificultades para asignarle un “fundamento accidental propio” distinto al de los otros predicamentos que le permita considerarla una de las “categorías”. (shrink)

For Kant, Aristotle's categories are arbitrary but brilliant and they do not ultimately correspond to extramental reality. For Aquinas, however, they are rational divisions of extramental being. In this perennial and ongoing dispute, the various positions seem to dissolve upon delving into the particulars of any one category. If, however, the categories are divisions of extramental being, it should be possible to offer plausible accounts of particular categories. I offer Aquinas's unstudied derivation of quality as a test case to see (...) how one could hold, and how Aquinas did hold, to a realism about Aristotle's categories at a highly specific level. Although Aristotle divides quality into four species and some further subspecies, unlike Aquinas, he offers no reasons for these divisions. For Aquinas each accident is a particular mode of existing, that is, it is a particular way that an accident exists in a substance. In the case of quality, this mode of existing follows substantial form and its real extramen.. (shrink)