In logic, a category, or predicament, is an assemblage of all the beings contained under any genus or kind ranged in order. The ancients, following Aristotle, held that all beings or objects of thought may be referred to ten categories: quantity, quality, relation, action, passion, time, place, situation, and habit. Plato admits only five: substance, identity, diversity, motion, and rest; the Stoics four: subjects, qualities, independent circumstances, relative circumstances. Descartes suggested seven divisions: spirit, matter, quantity, substance, figure, motion, and rest. Others make but two categories, substance and attribute, or subject and accident; or three, accident being divided into the inherent and circumstantial.
In the philosophy of Kant the term categories is applied to the primitive conceptions originating in the understanding independently of all experience (hence called pure conceptions), though incapable of being realized in thought except in their application to experience. These he divides into four classes, quantity, quality, relation, and modality, placing under the first class the conceptions of unity, plurality, and totality; under the second, reality, negation, and limitation; under the third, inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, and community (mutual action); and under the fourth, possibility and impossibility, existence and non-existence, necessity and contingency. J S Mill applies the term categories to the most general heads under which everything that may be asserted of any subject may be arranged. Of these he makes five, existence, co-existence, sequence, causation, and resemblance, or, considering causation as a peculiar case of sequence, four. Research Category
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