Abstract

This paper is concerned with the history of the concept of where in ancient philosophy. Though Aristotle was the fi rst to recognize the concept as a topic of philosophical interest, numbering the category of where among his ten categories, it is only from late antiquity that more extensive treatments of the concept have come down to us, in Plotinus’ The Genera of Being and Simplicius’ Commentary on the Categories. Plotinus rejects the category of where on the ground that, on any plausible understanding of locatives (i. e. expressions we use to say where something is), the things they signify do not make up a special category. To show this, Plotinus considers three at least plausible ways to construe the semantics of locatives: they may signify either (i) places or (ii) something in something else, or (iii) relations. The paper examines these three construals together with Plotinus’ dialectical arguments and Simplicius’ counter-arguments, concluding thatthe former, though highly illuminating, are unsuccessful and that, by and large, Simplicius is right in his defence of the category of where.