Stoic Categories - Overview

Overview

Our information comes from Plotinus and Simplicius, with additional evidence from Plutarch of Chaeronea and Sextus Empiricus. According to both Plotinus and Simplicius there were four Stoic categories, to wit:

• substance (ὑποκείμενον)
  • The primary matter, formless substance, (ousia) which makes up things.
• quality (ποιόν)
  • The way in which matter is organized to form an individual object. In Stoic physics, a physical ingredient (pneuma: air or breath) which informs the matter.
• somehow disposed (πως ἔχον)
  • Particular characteristics, not present within the object, such as size, shape, action, and posture.
• somehow disposed in relation to something (πρός τί πως ἔχον)
  • Characteristics which are related to other phenomena, such as the position of an object within time and space relative to other objects.

A simple example of the Stoic categories in use is provided by Jacques Brunschwig:

I am a certain lump of matter, and thereby a substance, an existent something (and thus far that is all); I am a man, and this individual man that I am, and thereby qualified by a common quality and a peculiar one; I am sitting or standing, disposed in a certain way; I am the father of my children, the fellow citizen of my fellow citizens, disposed in a certain way in relation to something else.