The first part of the paper examines the historico-philosophical roots and re-evaluations of the traditional link between the notion of individual substance and the subject-position in the structure of judgement, focusing on Aristotle, Kant and Hegel. The second part is devoted to Peter Strawson’s revival of the Aristotelian account and his attempt to derive a (hierarchically ordered) system of logico-grammatical asymmetries between the subject- and predicate-terms from the basic categorial opposition between particulars and general concepts. While Aristotle typically combines the categorial account of the subject-predicate distinction with the aboutness principle, Strawson emphasizes that both criteria can give incompatible results and opts for the former as philosophically more fundamental. In polemics with Strawson, the author defends the aboutness criterion (the ''legein ti kata tinos'' principle) and attempts to show that it meets the basic requirements which philosophy of language and mind should impose on the analysis of the subjectpredicate distinction. and Petr Koťátko