Albert the Great on What Should Be Known About Substance Before Reading Categories, 5

Prior to tackling the chapter on substance contained in Aristotle's Categories, Albert the Great inserts into his commentary (De praedicamentis) a review of a few meanings of the word "substance" that he says are key to understanding the text to come: substance as the first created thing, substance as the supreme genus of the first category, and substance as the concretely-existing individual. Albert's preliminary discussion of these three meanings is most welcome, but it is itself fraught with technical jargon and rendered at times obscure by how much it assumes the reader to know of distinctions that are not made there. Analyzing Albert's review piece by piece and in light of what he states elsewhere in his commentary and in his numerous other works, the article attempts to make more explicit and clearer the content, the presuppositions and the implications of the distinctions he makes concerning those three kinds of substances.