A trichotomy is a three-way
classificatory division. Some philosophers pursued trichotomies.
History
Important trichotomies discussed by
Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, OP (; it, Tommaso d'Aquino, lit=Thomas of Aquino; 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian Dominican friar and priest who was an influential philosopher, theologian and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism; he is known ...
include the
causal principles (agent, patient, act), the potencies for the
intellect (imagination, cogitative power, and memory and reminiscence), and the acts of the intellect (concept, judgment, reasoning), with all of those rooted in Aristotle; also the transcendentals of being (unity, truth, goodness) and the requisites of the
beautiful
Beautiful, an adjective used to describe things as possessing beauty, may refer to:
Film and theater
* ''Beautiful'' (2000 film), an American film directed by Sally Field
* ''Beautiful'' (2008 film), a South Korean film directed by Juhn Jai-h ...
(wholeness, harmony, radiance).
Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aest ...
expounded a
table of judgments involving four three-way alternatives, in regard to (1) Quantity, (2) Quality, (3) Relation, (4) Modality, and, based thereupon, a
table of four categories, named by the terms just listed, and each with three subcategories. Kant also adapted the
Thomistic
Thomism is the philosophical and theological school that arose as a legacy of the work
Work may refer to:
* Work (human activity), intentional activity people perform to support themselves, others, or the community
** Manual labour, physica ...
acts of intellect in his trichotomy of higher
cognition—(a) understanding, (b) judgment, (c) reason—which he correlated with his adaptation in the soul's capacities—(a) cognitive faculties, (b) feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and (c) faculty of desire
[Kant, Immanuel, ''The Critique of Judgment'', 2007 edition, Cosimo Classics, pp. 10-11.]—of
Tetens's trichotomy of feeling, understanding, will.
[Teo, Thomas (2005), ''The critique of psychology: from Kant to postcolonial theory'', p. 43.] In his ''Logic'' (113) Kant notes that all "polytomy are empirical" and "cannot be taught in logic".
[Kant I., (1800),]
''Logic''
(Logik), tr. J. Richardson London, 1819, p.209. In preparation he states "A division into two members goes under the appelation of dichotomy; but it, when consisting of more than two, takes the name of poytomy".
Hegel held that a thing's or idea's internal contradiction leads in a dialectical process to a new synthesis that makes better sense of the contradiction. The process is sometimes described as
thesis, antithesis, synthesis
Dialectic ( grc-gre, διαλεκτική, ''dialektikḗ''; related to dialogue; german: Dialektik), also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing ...
. It is instanced across a pattern of trichotomies (e.g. being-nothingness-becoming, immediate-mediate-concrete, abstract-negative-concrete); such trichotomies are not just three-way classificatory divisions; they involve trios of elements functionally interrelated in a process. They are often called triads (but 'triad' does not have that as a fixed sense in philosophy generally).
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".
Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...
built his philosophy on trichotomies and triadic relations and processes, and framed the "
Reduction Thesis" that every predicate is essentially either monadic (quality), dyadic (relation of reaction or resistance), or triadic (representational relation), and never genuinely and irreducibly tetradic or larger.
Examples of philosophical trichotomies
See also
*
Balanced ternary
Balanced ternary is a ternary numeral system (i.e. base 3 with three digits) that uses a balanced signed-digit representation of the integers in which the digits have the values −1, 0, and 1. This stands in contrast to the standard (unbalanc ...
*
Dichotomy
*
Epistemological pluralism __notoc__
Epistemological pluralism is a term used in philosophy, economics, and virtually any field of study to refer to different ways of knowing things, different epistemological methodologies for attaining a fuller description of a particular ...
*
Rule of three (writing)
The rule of three is a writing principle that suggests that a trio of entities such as events or characters is more humorous, satisfying, or effective than other numbers. The audience of this form of text is also thereby more likely to remember ...
*
Trilemma
A trilemma is a difficult choice from three options, each of which is (or appears) unacceptable or unfavourable. There are two logically equivalent ways in which to express a trilemma: it can be expressed as a choice among three unfavourable option ...
*
Trinity
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity (, from 'threefold') is the central dogma concerning the nature of God in most Christian churches, which defines one God existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God th ...
*
Tripartite motto
Notes
{{Reflist
History of philosophy
Classification systems
3 (number)