I’m glad to see Eliezer addressed this point. This post doesn’t get across how absolutely critical it is to understand that {categories always have exceptions, and that’s okay}. Understanding this demolishes nearly all Western philosophy since Socrates (who, along with Parmenides, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and a few others, corrupted Greek “philosophy” from the natural science of Thales and Anaximander, who studied the world to understand it, into a kind of theology, in which one dictates to the world what it must be like).
Many philosophers have recognized that Aristotle’s conception of categories fails; but most still assumed that that’s how categories must work in order to be “real”, and so proving that categories don’t work that way proved that categorizations “aren’t real”. They them became monists, like the Hindus / Buddhists / Parmenides / post-modernists. The way to avoid this is to understand nominalism, which dissolves the philosophical understanding of that quoted word “real”, and which I hope Eliezer has also explained somewhere.
I’m glad to see Eliezer addressed this point. This post doesn’t get across how absolutely critical it is to understand that {categories always have exceptions, and that’s okay}. Understanding this demolishes nearly all Western philosophy since Socrates (who, along with Parmenides, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and a few others, corrupted Greek “philosophy” from the natural science of Thales and Anaximander, who studied the world to understand it, into a kind of theology, in which one dictates to the world what it must be like).
Many philosophers have recognized that Aristotle’s conception of categories fails; but most still assumed that that’s how categories must work in order to be “real”, and so proving that categories don’t work that way proved that categorizations “aren’t real”. They them became monists, like the Hindus / Buddhists / Parmenides / post-modernists. The way to avoid this is to understand nominalism, which dissolves the philosophical understanding of that quoted word “real”, and which I hope Eliezer has also explained somewhere.