 We return briefly to the question why al-Fārābī includes the subject of categories in a logic syllabus. Commentaries in the Alexandrian tradition normally started with a statement of the purpose of the material to be discussed. Al-Fārābī’s epitome [Categories] has no such statement, but the surviving fragments of the longer [Commentary on Categories] do address the question. They tell us (p. 196) that Aristotle’s Categories was intended to catalogue the simple universal primary concepts, but Aristotle found it sufficient to catalogue the ten supreme genera instead. Some people (p. 202) didn’t think Categories was specifically intended for logic; but “under the conditions we have mentioned, the contents of Categories turn out to be a specific part of logic”. But in fact no such conditions have been mentioned, at least in the surviving fragments. What needs to be shown is that the features (the aḥwāl) of categories studied in the first book of the syllabus are ones that will serve some purpose in later books. But this issue is not addressed at all. Al-Fārābī does address it in [Rhetoric] 87.16–89.4, where he says that the terms of premises can be in any of the ten supreme genera, in any combination. This only confirms the suspicion that the supreme genera are irrelevant to logical reasoning.