Following Aristotle, Kant uses the term categories to describe the "pure concepts of the understanding, which apply to objects of intuition in general a priori…"[1] Kant further wrote about the categories: "They are concepts of an object in general, by means of which its intuition is regarded as determined with regard to one of the logical functions for judgments.
The word comes from the Greek κατηγορία, katēgoria, meaning "that which can be said, predicated, or publicly declared and asserted, about something."
John Stuart Mill wrote: "The Categories, or Predicaments—the former a Greek word, the latter its literal translation in the Latin language—were believed to be an enumeration of all things capable of being named, an enumeration by the summa genera (highest kind), i.e., the most extensive classes into which things could be distributed, which, therefore, were so many highest Predicates, one or other of which was supposed capable of being affirmed with truth of every nameable thing whatsoever.
"[6] Aristotle had claimed that the following ten predicates or categories could be asserted of anything in general: substance, quantity, quality, relation, action, affection (passivity), place, time (date), position, and state.
Kant appreciated Aristotle's effort, but said that his table was imperfect because " … as he had no guiding principle, he merely picked them up as they occurred to him..."[7] The Categories do not provide knowledge of individual, particular objects.
Kant created a table of the forms of such judgments as they relate to all objects in general.
Taken together, these twelvefold tables constitute the formal structure for Kant's architectonic conception of his philosophical system.