ARISTOTLE’S DOCTRINE ON CATEGORIES IN THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

Sudakova Tatyana Grigor’evna, Kaziev Eduard Viktorovich

In the history of philosophy, one can hardly find a more significant thinker than Aristotle, whose doctrine became the basis not only of European philosophy, but also of systematic scientific knowledge in general. In turn, the logical basis of the immense scientific heritage of the philosopher is his doctrine of categories, which is the starting point for Aristotle’s ontology and dialectics. Consideration of this doctrine in proto- and epigenetic aspects was the goal of the study. As a result, it was found that Aristotle’s doctrine of categories was the first attempt of a scientific ontology that reproduces the constituent elements of the actual subject content in the form of higher logical concepts. The contradiction appertained the positions of his predecessors between the object-sensory perception of a separate thing and its rational representation as a universal element in a number of similar things, Aristotle solved dialectically through a synthesis in the categories of general principles of formal logical thinking and direct individual experience. This substantive opposition of the general and the particular in the writings of his most significant followers was developed into an idea of Anima mundi and its incarnations, uniting with it through the loss of their objective individuality.

Keywords:Aristotle, categories, method, dialectics, cognition