Given any category $C$ with finite limits, let $D$ be the full subcategory of $C$ consisting of those objects $X$ for which a power object $P(X)$ exists.
Then, one might ask whether the following properties hold:
- $1 \in D$, i.e. $C$ has a subobject classifier.
- If $X,Y \in D$, then also $X \times Y \in D$.
- If $Y \to X$ is a monomorphism and $X \in D$, then also $Y \in D$.
- If $X \in D$, then also $P(X) \in D$.
The above four properties imply that $D$ is a topos. Could this happen without $C$ being itself a topos (so $D \ne C$)?
To show that an object $X$ has a power object, it might help to realize $X$ as a subobject of an object that is known to have a power object. Unfortunately, this is hard to do (for example, we cannot take the "singleton" map $X \to P(X)$ since we don't even know that $P(X)$ exists in the first place).