L’ordine delle cose. Aristotele versus Kant

The notion of order is examined from two perspectives: as order of things and order of intellect. Aristotle is a clear representative of the former, Kant of the latter. According to Kant, before the intervention of intellect there is just something undetermined and unstructured which the intellect orders in a world. Without thought, there would be no ordered world, but there would still be something. This means that the claims of realism are not completely eliminable, because there must be something of which something else appears as a phenomenon. Realism does not consists simply in recognizing the existence of a world independent of thought, but in recognizing that this world has an order independent of thought. Applying to Aristotle the Kantian deduction of categories from judgment, it is shown that, for Aristotle, the structure of the world which informs thought is reflected in the structure of language, and that judgment (the order of speech), if it is truthful, reflects the order of the world, an order which is not fixed and immutable, but is, nonetheless, an order.