 Intellectual cognition (see Friedman 1999; Adriaenssen 2014, esp. pp. 85–95; Friedman 2015; Adriaenssen 2017a, pp. 82–99): Auriol’s solution to the question of what a concept is takes its point of departure in the necessity of explaining three things at once: essential predication; intellectual acquaintance with extra-mental objects; and necessary, scientific knowledge. Auriol holds that the first of these explanatory requirements would not be fulfilled by any theory of concepts according to which the concept is a type of representation or token of the thing, if this representation has real — albeit mental — being. Examples that he gives of solutions of this sort are that a concept might be the intellectual act or an intelligible species or any type of accident terminating an act of the understanding. All of these representations have some real being of their own. According to Auriol, these types of representational theories of concepts would make explaining essential predication impossible, since, assuming any of them, when I predicated, e.g., animal of human being, I would make a false predication, inasmuch as the concept human being would not be the concept animal. The ultimate problem with theories of universals of this sort, according to Auriol, is that if they were correct, then universals would not be universals at all, but would be particulars with their own real being. Moreover, not only these same types of representational views of concepts, but also any theory that holds concepts to be Platonic Ideas, would hinder us in having intellectual acquaintance with extra-mental objects, Auriol’s second explanatory requirement. On both these types of theories, our knowledge would extend only to these really existing entities. We would, according to Auriol, be intellectually blind to extra-mental reality. On the other hand, we could certainly have intellectual acquaintance with extra-mental objects, if our concepts were particular things in the extra-mental world as they exist extra-mentally — a final position Auriol criticizes — but we would be unable to have necessary, scientific knowledge, Auriol’s third explanatory requirement. In fact, we would be unable to make universal judgments of any kind, since there would be nothing universal about our knowledge; instead of knowing that all mules are sterile, we would know only that this mule is sterile and that that mule is sterile.