Abstract

Thinking is often thought of as a kind of connecting—in the sense of searching for pre-existent connections and exhibiting what has been found; in the sense of making connections and exhibiting what has been made; or in some third sense which combines the former with the latter in some way. In explicitly or implicitly employing certain methods in one’s thinking one ipso facto uses so-called “categories,” i.e., concepts of high generality, characterizing aspects of whatever exists or can be thought. Aristotle, who conceived of thinking mainly as finding, Kant, who conceived of it mainly as making and some of their successors set themselves the task of listing, clarifying and justifying a set of categories, which in each case was judged by the philosopher who propounded it to be uniquely necessary and thus absolutely preferable to any competing set.