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The Power of (and the Problem With) Names
How our natural desire to classify leads us astray
This post is all about naming plants and animals, so let’s start with an oddly-named plant: the Tree of Porphyry.
Porphyry was a Greco-Roman philosopher who expanded on the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Like a lot of ancient philosophers, he wrote about all kinds of stuff: vegetarianism, epic poetry, why Christians should be executed. But he’s probably most famous for writing the Isagoge, a text about logic that became standard in the medieval Muslim and Christian worlds.
In the Isagoge, Porphyry explains his method for sorting everything on earth into tidy categories. The medieval translators of his work diagrammed it like this:
Porphyry instructed his readers to ask a series of two-pronged questions about an object; with each successive question, you’d hone in on the essence of the object. For example, you might ask whether a body is animate or inanimate; if animate, you’d ask whether it’s sensitive to stimuli or insensitive; if sensitive, you’d ask whether it’s rational or irrational… and so on, until you realized you were talking about…
