Categories

The Stoics held that all beings (ὄντα)—although not all things (τινά)—are material.^[58] Besides the existing beings, they admitted four incorporeals (asomata): time, place, void, and sayable.^[59] They were held to be just 'subsisting' while such a status was denied to universals.^[60] Thus, they accepted Anaxagoras's idea (as did Aristotle) that if an object is hot, it is because some part of a universal heat body had entered the object. But, unlike Aristotle, they extended the idea to cover all chance incidents. Thus, if an object is red, it would be because some part of a universal red body had entered the object.

They held that there were four categories:

1. Substance (ὑποκείμενον): The primary matter, formless substance, (ousia) that things are made of
2. Quality (ποιόν): The way matter is organized to form an individual object; in Stoic physics, a physical ingredient (pneuma: air or breath), which informs the matter
3. Somehow disposed (πως ἔχον): Particular characteristics, not present within the object, such as size, shape, action, and posture
4. Somehow disposed in relation to something (πρός τί πως ἔχον): Characteristics related to other phenomena, such as the position of an object within time and space relative to other objects

A simple example of the Stoic categories in use is provided by Jacques Brunschwig:

I am a certain lump of matter, and thereby a substance, an existent something (and thus far that is all); I am a man, and this individual man that I am, and thereby qualified by a common quality and a peculiar one; I am sitting or standing, disposed in a certain way; I am the father of my children, the fellow citizen of my fellow citizens, disposed in a certain way in relation to something else.[