Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Harmonizing Evolutionary Convergence

Glossary Menus

category

In Panosophy, category is mostly used in the phrase ‘transcending the categories’, to find Love and Peace, beyond conflict and suffering, by healing the fragmented mind and split psyche in Wholeness and the Truth.

Historically, the word seems to have denoted the attempts of philosophers to find the basic concepts of reason, from Aristotle’s twelve categories to Immanuel Kant’s twelve, which he classified into four groups of three. These then influenced Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic architectonic, in which he came close to discovering the fundamental law of the Universe, as the Cosmic Equation.

Then in the middle of the twentieth century, Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane introduced category theory into mathematics to abstract even more generality from the patterns that they observed in the various branches of mathematics. Eugenia Cheng, who teaches category theory to liberal arts students, says, “category theory is the mathematics of mathematics,” focusing attention on the relationships between forms, called morphisms, rather than on the properties of the objects themselves.

However, mathematicians have not realized that they are implicitly using Integral Relational Logic as a meta-algebra, in doing so. They have therefore not yet stepped out of mathematics to find Peace by taking this process of abstraction to the utmost level of generality—unifying mysticism and mathematics as Panosophers. One who sensed this possibility was Alexander Grothendieck, who taught category theory in Hanoi in the middle of the Vietnam War, becoming a recluse in later life.

Regarding the concept that category represents, although this is virtually indistinguishable from the concept of class, as Bertrand Russell and H. W. Fowler pointed out, in Integral Relational Logic, class denotes a primal concept, while category is a synonym.

See also: 

Etymology

1588, ‘highest notion, naming, asserting’ in Aristotle’s logic, from French catégorie, from Late Latin categoria, a weakening of pre-Aristotelian Greek kategoria ‘accusation, prediction, category’, verbal noun from kategorein ‘to speak against; to accuse, assert, predicate’, from kata ‘down, downwards; opposite, against’, possibly from PIE root *kat- ‘down’, and agoreuein ‘to harangue, to declaim (in the assembly)’, from agora ‘public assembly’, from PIE root *ger- ‘to gather’.

Common ancestor(s):