Aristotelian Logic - The Problem of Universals

In his notes on aristotle's categories, lefevre adopted what might be called a moderate realist position. While there is nothing outside the mind that is genuinely universal, neither are universals simply conventional or arbitrary fictions to categorize things. Rather, there are genuine similarities between things out in the world. When we notice the similarities between, say, giraffes, our minds take the properties common to all the giraffes and add the notion of universality to them to form a general idea of giraffes. As these examples show, leFevre was himself something of a contradiction, both a humanist and a scholastic, until he wasn't.