Categories of Dialectics

The content of all principles and laws of dialectics is manifested through a system of categories, which express general connections of some certain processes. Categories are such notions, which have been developed by people during the whole socio-historical practice. But not all notions could be related to the categories. Notions become categories when they indicate the most important in objects and phenomena, generalize the system of properties. The categories of philosophy are general concepts reflecting the most essential, law-governed connections and relationships of re­ality; they are "stages of distinguishing, i.e. of cognizing the world, focal points in the web, which assist in cognizing and mastering it".

Philosophical categories reproduce the properties and relations of existence in a global form. But, just as in any other science, not all philosophical categories are universal. For example, epistemological categories like knowledge, truth, or error describe some essential aspects of cognitive activity only. There are, however, universal phil­osophical categories as well. These regulate the real process of thinking and gradually form a separate system in the course of its historical development; here belong such categories as connection, interaction, reflection, information, development, causality, struc­ture, system, form, content, essence, phenomenon, etc. The basic laws of dia­lectics implement the links between and interaction of the ca­tegories. Moreover, they are themselves expanded categories. Even the concept of law is a category. Reflecting as they do the objective dialectics of reality, the ca­tegories and laws of dialectics, cognized by man, act as a universal method of the cognition and transformation of reality. Knowledge is at first moulded as general concepts and ca­tegories which form the basis for certain principles of both being and thinking itself.

Every science has its own historically established arsenal of logi­cal instruments of thinking in terms of which the properties and es­sence of objects are perceived. Of course, any science operates with concepts of varying degree of generality and significance, but its framework is made up of the fundamental concepts.

The categories of philosophy are in­terconnected in such a way that each of them can only be perceived as an element of the overall system. Thus, the material and spiritual reality cannot be understood in terms of the category of matter only, without recourse to the categories of motion, development, space, time, and many others.

The order of philosophical categories in the system is based on the growing complexity of objective connections and the movement of knowledge from the simple to the complex.

The basic categories are as follows:

· essence and phenomenon;

· the individual, the particular and the general;

· cause and effect;

· necessity and chance;

· possibility, reality and probability;

· part and whole, system;

· content and form.