transvaluation of values See NIETZSCHE. transversality, transcendence of the sovereignty of identity or self-sameness by recognizing the alterity of the Other as Unterschied – to use Heidegger’s term – which signifies the sense of relatedness by way of difference. An innovative idea employed and appropriated by such diverse philosophers as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, transversality is meant to replace the Eurocentric formulation of truth as universal in an age when the world is said to be rushing toward the global village. Universality has been a Eurocentric idea because what is particular in the West is universalized, whereas what is particular elsewhere remains particularized. Since its center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere, truth is polycentric and correlative. Particularly noteworthy is the American phenomenologist Calvin O. Schrag’s attempt to appropriate transversality by splitting the difference between the two extremes of absolutism and relativism on the one hand and modernity’s totalizing practices and postmodernity’s fragmentary tendencies on the other. See also HEIDEGGER , MERLEAU -PONTY, PHENOM- ENOLOGY, SARTR. H.Y.J. tree of Porphyry, a structure generated from the logical and metaphysical apparatus of Aristotle’s Categories, as systematized by Porphyry and later writers. A tree in the category of substance begins with substance as its highest genus and divides that genus into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subordinate genera by means of a pair of opposites, called differentiae, yielding, e.g., corporeal substance and incorporeal substance. The process of division by differentiae continues until a lowest species is reached, a species that cannot be divided further. The species ‘human being’ is said to be a lowest species whose derivation can be recaptured from the formula ‘mortal, rational, sensitive, animate, corporeal substance.’ See also ARISTOTLE , INFIMA SPECIES , PORPHYR. W.E.M.