 Boethius operates with “things” (res) on such a high level of abstraction that, like Avicennian quiddities or common natures, they are undetermined as to particularity or universality, but have modes or ways of being (modi essendi) either this or that; thus the concrete term album “(something) white” and the abstract albedo “whiteness” signify the same, though in different ways, reflecting two different modes of being of that “thing” (Ebbesen 1988). On the other hand, he is clear that the fundamental furniture of the world consists of particulars, and while believing in essences, he refuses to hypostatize them: he rejects the notion that existence (esse) is accidental to essence and that an uninstantiated universal can function as a verifier of a proposition by virtue of some “essential being” (esse essentiale), as some of his contemporaries claimed.