What did Kant mean by the term "category" and did the term change meaning with Hegel?

Question

What does Kant mean by the term "category" and did the term change meaning with Hegel? I'm not asking about for an enumeration of his categories, but what the term means, therein.

I read the wikipedia article, but it's not super clear because it leaves "understanding" undefined, and I was left wondering how e.g. that term linked to a posteriori knowledge.

Obviously some philosophers are going to use the term differently if not discussing Kant, but e.g. Aristotle or something more contemporary perhaps. But I'm also interested in what Hegelians mean by the term, how its application may differ from how it appears in Kant.

Answer 1

A category is a class. The term "category" implies classification. We classify a topic into classes. We categorize a subject into categories. In Western philosophy, the term 'categories' pertains usually to general metaphysics, that is ontology. An ontologist categorizes the kinds of being, such as: substance, quality, quantity, relation, fact, etc. The origin is apparently in Aristotle, who laid out his ontology in the Categories and later developed it in the Physics and in the Metaphysics. Many later philosophers discussed the list of categories. The special thing about Kant was that his list of categories was not derived from purely metaphysical considerations, but largely from subjective i.e. epistemological and psychological considerations. Hegel continued this tendency. In Hegel's philosophy the very distinctions betweem subjective, objective and absolute become blurred by a to and fro "dialectic" movement of derivation. And while Kant's list contained 12 categories, Hegel's list stretched to about 270 categories.

Answer 2

The OED defines "category" as:

^{Greek κατηγορία accusation, assertion, predication, abstract noun}

1. b. Kant applied the term to: The pure a priori conceptions of the understanding, which the mind applies (as forms or frames) to the matter of knowledge received from sense, in order to raise it into an intelligible notion or object of knowledge.

This quote shows the difference between Kant and Aristotle:

^{1829 W. Hamilton in Edinb. Rev. Oct. 211}
The predicaments of Aristotle are…objective, of things as understood; those of Kant subjective, of the mind as understanding… In reality, the whole Kantian categories must be excluded from the Aristotelic list…as determinations of thought, and not genera of real things.