Video and Podcast Resources On Aristotle's Categories
32 videos and 32 podcast episodes designed to lead learners through this classic philosophical work
My first encounter with Aristotle - a thinker I would much later come to appreciate, teach, apply, and publish works on - was being assigned his short but puzzling work the Categories in an Ancient Philosophy class. In my experience, either the Categories or the Nicomachean Ethics tend to be the first texts by Aristotle many students or lifelong learners read. Neither of those works are really introductory texts, but then again, we don’t really possess any actual introductory-level text by Aristotle, in my view.
Because it is the first work in what later comes to be called Aristotle’s “organon”, six texts that deal with logic, language, inquiry, and dialectic - and because a lot of people assume that logic is where one ought to start in philosophy - the Categories often does get assigned or recommended as if it were the right book to start with in studying Aristotle’s philosophy.
As a college student, I found it confusing from the very start, and unfortunately I didn’t have particularly good professors to work with in making sense of it, so I didn’t acquire much understanding of the text and its topics back then. We also had to read it in graduate school, since it was on some of the reading lists for our preliminary examinations. By then, I’d read enough other works by Aristotle, and I’d learned enough Greek to read it in the original as well as in English translation, that it made more sense to me.
Quite a few people asked me if I’d produce videos on the Categories to help them better understand the work, so back in 2017, I decided to shoot an entire sequence of core concept lectures on it. And then later on down the line, I converted all of those video lectures into downloadable podcast lectures on the work. So I have 32 lectures going through the entire work, available in both formats, available as resources for those who find themselves getting into difficulties as they study the work.
Here are links to all of those lectures on the Categories in video and podcast format
Univocal, Equivocal, And Derivative Terms | watch video | listen to podcast
In A Subject Vs Predicated Of A Subject | watch video | listen to podcast
The Ten Categories | watch video | listen to podcast
Primary And Secondary Substances | watch video | listen to podcast
Species And Genus | watch video | listen to podcast
Contraries And Substances | watch video | listen to podcast
Opinions, Statements, And Contraries | watch video | listen to podcast
The Category Of Quantity | watch video | listen to podcast
Quantity In Primary And Secondary Senses | watch video | listen to podcast
Space, Time, and Number | watch video | listen to podcast
The Category Of Relation | watch video | listen to podcast
Relation And Correlatives | watch video | listen to podcast
Relations, Contraries, And Degrees | watch video | listen to podcast
Relation, Knowledge, And Perception | watch video | listen to podcast
The Category Of Quality | watch video | listen to podcast
Natural Capacities as Qualities | watch video | listen to podcast
Figures And Forms Of Things | watch video | listen to podcast
Qualities, Habits, And Dispositions | watch video | listen to podcast
Passive Qualities And Passions | watch video | listen to podcast
Qualities And Contraries | watch video | listen to podcast
Qualities, Relations, And Knowledge | watch video | listen to podcast
Four Types Of Opposition | watch video | listen to podcast
Contraries And Intermediates | watch video | listen to podcast
Privatives And Positives | watch video | listen to podcast
Affirmation And Denial | watch video | listen to podcast
Changes From Opposites Into Each Other | watch video | listen to podcast
Truth And Falsity Of Opposite Statements | watch video | listen to podcast
More About Characteristics of Contraries | watch video | listen to podcast
Four (Or Five) Senses Of The Term "Prior" | watch video | listen to podcast
Different Senses Of "Simultaneous" | watch video | listen to podcast
Six Types Of Motion | watch video | listen to podcast
Senses Of The Term "To Have" | watch video | listen to podcast
So there they are: links to 32 videos and corresponding podcast episodes covering all of the main ideas developed in Aristotle’s work the Categories. I hope you find them useful resources, if you decide to study this often tricky philosophical text!