ARISTOTLE VS. PLATO: Primary and Secondary Substances

In contrast to the dialogues of Plato, which were well preserved by his disciples and later generations, the works of Aristotle came to us having been arranged approximately two hundred years after Aristotle's death, i.e., in the first century BC by a Greek philosopher named Andronicus of Rhodes.

Andronicus belonged to the school of stoicism, which claimed ethics as the most crucial philosophical discipline. Thus, Andronicus appropriately ordered the Corpus Aristotelicum, starting with Aristotle's logical treatises and culminating with his work on ethics.

According to this tradition, the short logical treatise Categories is placed by Aristotle's first editor as the starting point of the logical works concerned with the technique and the principles of proof grouped under the name of the Organon.

The word “category” in Greek literally means “an accusation of something,” and at the time of Aristotle, it was used in courts. As for Aristotle himself, in Categories, he is, so to speak, accusing the nature of being structured a certain way. Aristotle also opposes his understanding of substance to that of Plato and sketches the philosophical project later developed in Metaphysics.

In the Categories, Aristotle distinguishes between primary and secondary substances. In this video, I present and analyze his distinction and explain how Aristotle's position differs from Plato's.