 Although Platonism definitely survived throughout the Middle Ages (and beyond), in the guise of the interconnected doctrines of divine ideas, participation, and illumination, there was a quite general Aristotelian  consensus,[27]  especially after Abelard’s time, that the mundane universals of the species and genera of material beings exist as such in the human mind, as a result of the mind’s abstracting from their individuating conditions. But consensus concerning this much by no means entailed a unanimous agreement on exactly what the universals thus abstracted are, what it is for them to exist in the mind, how they are related to their particulars, what their real foundation in those particulars is, what their role is in the constitution of our universal knowledge, and how they contribute to the encoding and communication of this knowledge in the various human languages. For although the general Aristotelian stance towards universals successfully handles the inconsistencies quite obviously generated by a naïve Platonist ontology, it gives rise precisely to these further problems of its own.