Dr Myrto Hatzimichali (University of Cambridge) 'Words or things? The linguistic interpretation of Aristotle's Categories.'

Among Aristotle’s works, the Categories was the most studied and commented on from the first century BC to Late Antiquity, despite the fact that its commentators could not agree on what it was actually about! What did Aristotle divide into ten categories: words, things, or both, including the concepts that link them? This paper will analyse the view of those who took it to be about words (Stoics expecting to find a grammatical theory of parts of speech), and will present an alternative case where a linguistic interpretation is more promising than its rivals.