Introduction: Concept
In ancient Greece, Milletus, ‘academic’ and ‘philosophy’ were born. Academics and philosophy were not separated yet in the early 6th to 5th centuries B.C., the beginnings of European thinking. It was not until Aristotle, one of the masters of Greek thought, in the 4th century B.C. that philosophy and learning began to divide.
The terms used to divide the academic terms we use now: are theory (‘theoria’ in Greek), system (‘genos’ in Greek), concept (‘genus’ in Latin), and concept (‘conceptus‘ in Latin) are also terms coined by Aristotle.
If a concept refers to something general, it’s an Aristotelian expression again, because the word “general” is a translation of Aristotle’s new word “Ta katholou.”
The term “catholic” that we use today also comes from this ‘Ta katholou’. In ‘connect’, which means concept, the word ‘connect’ implies ‘catch’. In German, the concept is ‘Begriff”, which ‘greifen’ means ‘catch’.
In this way, exploring the process of language change is to understand the process of thinking. In other words, the history of thought is the history of the concept.
If there is no concept, the experience will disappear after a day, or even if it remains, it will not understand its meaning. Concepts capture the experience and make it understandable.
Concepts can be said to be the minimum semantic element of an article, not the content of an idea. Concepts form a form of verbal expression, and they also mean the content of the idea.
Memory is as if the concept is stamped in the wax of the brain. We are remembered in experience because there is a concept. Concepts capture the experience and make it understandable.
So the concept is “to generalize and average the content of our experience, which is extremely subtle, fluid and ambiguous, and further reveal the meaning of the content.”
For example, there are dozens of headache-related diseases alone. For a doctor, the concept is to grab the symptoms that the patient experiences and make a diagnosis as a concept.
Hippocrates, what we call the “Father of Medicine,” tried in a reasonable way to diagnose and treat diseases that had previously been magically practiced. This concept is understood to exist first for specific objects or experiences.
And just as the thought-provoking concept of a headache leads to a variety of different concepts, you can see that concepts and objects or concepts and experiences are intricately intertwined with each other.
The characteristic of philosophical concepts is that they are used not only in certain discourses but also at intersections where many discourses meet. And even if they’re the same concepts, they go through a process of constantly redefining throughout the history of thought. That’s why the history of thought is understood as the history of concepts.
Category
Categories are important in philosophical thinking. Category theory is important because the nature of the discourse of philosophy is to understand the world macroscopically and comprehensively. It’s a desire to conceptually map the world, so to speak.
The Greek word ‘katêgoria’ comes from ‘katêgorerô‘, which means “I affirm.” This is the original legal term that means “I accuse.”
The term category is closely related to the concept of judgment. The first thing that comes to mind when it comes to categories is Aristotle’s Categoriae. Rather, the other philosopher about the concept of categories is Plato, too. In 『Sophist』, he talks about a category of words.
In the book, the existence and existence, movement and suspension, the same person and type, which are presented as the best kinds of Plato, are discourses related to the ontology of today.
Plato’s discussions continued to influence the theories of categories through the Middle Ages through Aristotle, his disciple. There is first of all the most fundamental distinction in Aristotle. One is something that exists as itself, and the other is something that exists by sticking to the batter. The former is an entity, and the latter is an accidental entity.
I analyzed the language in the propositions that appeared in everything in the world. In ontology, reality and accidental existence correspond to subject and predicate linguistically. Therefore, the basic form of logic called S-P structure is already based on the ontological structure of entity-nature.
In this way, in the categories of substance and milk, the category is the classification of predicates belonging to milk. So the Greek ‘katêgoria’ was translated into Latin, and it became ‘praedicamentum‘, and here we have today’s ‘predicate’.
If the Greek category is an ontological concept, the Latin category is a logical concept. It’s the 10 categories that come out of these propositions. There are substance, nature, quantity, relationship, active, manual, state, time, place, and location.
Among these, in my view, the most important category in this book is ‘entity’. It is called ‘ousia‘ in Greek, and ‘Substantia‘ in Latin. This is where the English word ‘substance‘ comes from.
The essence of God would therefore be better to say ‘essentia’ than in Latin ‘substantia’, and we understand, to our very little ability and extent, the Father, the saints, and the Holy Spirit, which never changes in itself.
St. Augustine
Here’s the Substantia that we learned. But there’s “essentia” that We didn’t learn, and We don’t know what “Ecentia” is, but you can guess that at least the Latin word for “essentia” in modern English “essence” came out. The translator of this book annotated it.
“Substantia” is a passive word from “sub stans“, meaning a potential presence with potential. “essentia” is an active word from “esse“, meaning an active presence. Medieval Scola theologians, like Augustine, used both of these words to point to divine nature but preferred “essentia”.
For Aristotle, a category is a category of existence. It’s the structure of the world itself. And categories expressed in language have meaning to the extent that they correspond to the objective-existential categories. It means that there is a ‘match’ between things and language.
Truth is defined as the “correspondent” of object and judgment/proposition, and it is more fundamentally based on the premise of “consistency between existence and reason.”
It can be said that the Daejeon system of Western traditional thinking lies in this Teje, which is a match between existence and reason. The concordance between existence and reason is represented by the word ‘representation’.
When it comes to truth or truth, philosophically it means truth. When dealing with truth in philosophy, we think of individual cases and formally reflect on the structure of truth. Philosophy is essentially about universality, so we think of the material side.
Therefore, it has no choice but to be formal and abstract. As philosophy is often referred to as the pursuit of truth, all kinds of truth theories have risen and fell in the history of philosophy. But these can be summed up in correspondence theory and coherence theory.
If you look at it that way, the match between existence and reason is the theory of truth corresponding to correspondence. The theory of response to truth, in its simplest form, is that what you claim to be true is true only if it coincides with reality.
More abstractly, many correspondence theorists argue that truth is achieved when the truth bearer is in an appropriate match with the truth builder. The proper analysis of truth is therefore associated with the analysis of truth-bearers, match relationships, and truth builders.
Kant is the philosopher who developed the discourse of ‘category’ after Aristotle. He says that the category of Aristotle is empirically incomplete, so he responds to the table of judgment, using all the functions of judgment to derive the kinds of categories and again deduct a priori.
We can’t say that human thought is formed only through our experience. It seems to have rather preceded our way of experiencing.
