Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

The Latin Tradition of Logic to 1100 31
ousia itself, quantity and quality can each be found in all the other Categories
(466A-8B), because, for instance, there is a condition with regard to relationship
between big, small and medium in the Category of quantity, or of father and son
(in the Category of relation) to each other; and one can ask, for instance, ‘What
kind of (qualis) relation?’, ‘What kind of being-acted-on?’ There are, therefore,
varieties of quality and condition that are not in ousia, and Eriugena adds that
relation too can be outside ousia; indeed, it is inside ousia only when it is the
relation between genera and species.
Another division (469A) is between those Categories that are at rest (in statu)
— ousia, quantity, being-in-a-position (situs) and place — and those that are in
motion (in motu) — quality, relation, condition, time, acting, being-acted-upon.
Although these divisions are not altogether intuitively obvious, Eriugena explains
them (469B-70D), calling upon various assumptions he expects his readers to share
or at least accept: for instance, quantity is at rest because everything is trying to
reach its perfect quantity and remain there in it. Von Perger [2005, 246] sees one of
the points behind Eriugena’s multiplying of different schemes — schemes that agree
neither with each other nor with the divisions put forward, in their discussions of
God and the Categories by Augustine and Boethius — as an attempt to show that
no matter how the Categories are grouped, they give no knowledge of God.
A more straightforward consequence of grouping the Categories, however, is
that, contrary to Aristotle, they will no longer be the most universal ways of
dividing up things. As Eriugena puts it:
. . . I have said that more diligent research can find some things in
nature besides what is comprehended by the ten Categories — for these
things have been found by the philosophers — lest someone of limited
abilities should think that the careful investigation of things could not
go beyond the number of Categories mentioned before. For there is a
more general classification (ratio) of their genera — that they are in
motion and rest. Further, rest and motion are collected by universal
essence, which lets itself be divided to infinity. For the substance which
has the first place in the Categories, is finite and subject to accidents,
but universal essence receives no accidents in itself. Indeed, it is capable
of accidents in its subdivisions extending as far as the individuals, but
it in itself is simple and not subject to accidents. (597A)
Eriugena goes on to suggest that even the division he has just suggested is not
comprehensive, because ‘no one of those who correctly philosophize doubts that
possible things and impossible things should be counted in the number of things’
(597B), and he refers his readers (as noted above) to Aristotle’s ‘Peri ermenias’.
This is an astonishing moment in modal theory, since, at a period when a statistical
account of possibility and necessity in temporal terms was normal, Eriugena in a
stroke conjures up the idea of innumerable possible and even, more strangely,
impossible worlds. But for his broader discussion of logic and the metaphysics he
draws from it, what is more important is the division he makes between two sorts