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Porphyry And Plotinus On The Reality Of Relations, Dirk Baltzly

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Both Plotinus and Porphyry contribute in their own ways to the tradition of neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories. In 6.1-2, Plotinus argues that Aristotle’s ten categories are not adequate as an account of the genera of Being and that for this purpose they ought to be supplanted by the five greatest kinds from Plato’s Sophist. In 6.3, he acknowledges that it would be desirable to have a system of categories, not genera, for the sensible realm. He proposes several reductions of Aristotle’s ten categories to more compact schemes and finally seems to settle on the number five: composite, relative, quantity, …