The desire to define “everything” can be traced back thousands of years in our known history. Aristotle, in “Categories”, provides us with one of the first recorded attempts of uniquely categorising all “things” – both animate and inanimate, even directly contradicting the views of his teacher, Plato, while doing so. In parallel to this, more than three thousand miles to the east, in the Vaisheshika and Nyaya schools of the Hindu philosophy, the “Padārthas” were created – first verbally and then in writing – in order to serve a similar purpose. These geographically – and temporally – separate efforts, aiming to achieve the same general goal, show us that there is an innate need to conceptually organise everything that constitutes our perception of reality, in a categorically distinct manner.
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