 In this brief summary account, I will survey the problem both from a systematic and from a historical point of view. In the next section I will first motivate the problem by showing how naturally the questions concerning universals emerge if we consider how we come to know a universal claim, i.e., one that concerns a potentially infinite number of particulars of a given kind, in a simple geometrical demonstration. I will also briefly indicate why a naïve Platonic answer to these questions in terms of the theory of perfect Forms, however plausible it may seem at first, is inadequate. In the third section, I will briefly discuss how the specific medieval questions concerning universals emerged, especially in the context of answering Porphyry’s famous questions in his introduction to Aristotle’s Categories, which will naturally lead us to a discussion of Boethius’ Aristotelian answers to these questions in his second commentary on Porphyry in the fourth section. However, Boethius’ Aristotelian answers anticipated only one side of the medieval discussions: the mundane, philosophical theory of universals, in terms of Aristotelian abstractionism. But the other important, Neo-Platonic, theological side of the issue provided by Boethius, and, most importantly, by St. Augustine, was for medieval thinkers the theory of ontologically primary universals as the creative archetypes of the divine mind, the Divine Ideas. Therefore, the fifth section is going to deal with the main ontological and epistemological problems generated by this theory, namely, the apparent conflict between divine simplicity and the multiplicity of divine ideas, on the one hand, and the tension between the Augustinian theory of divine illumination and Aristotelian abstractionism, on the other. Some details of the early medieval Boethian-Aristotelian approach to the problem and its combination with the Neo-Platonic Augustinian tradition before the influx of the newly recovered logical, metaphysical, and physical writings of Aristotle and their Arabic commentaries in the second half of the 12th century will be taken up in the sixth section, in connection with Abelard’s (1079–1142) discussion of Porphyry’s questions. The seventh section will discuss some details of the characteristic metaphysical approach to the problem in the 13th century, especially as it was shaped by the influence of Avicenna’s (980–1037) doctrine of common nature. The eighth section outlines the most general features of the logical conceptual framework that served as the common background for the metaphysical disagreements among the authors of this period. I will argue that it is precisely this common logical-semantical framework that allows the grouping together of authors who endorse sometimes radically different metaphysics and epistemologies (not only in this period, but also much later, well into the early modern period) as belonging to what in later medieval philosophy came to be known as the “realist” via antiqua, the “old way” of doing philosophy and theology. By contrast, it was precisely the radically different logical-semantical approach initiated by William Ockham (ca. 1280–1350), and articulated and systematized most powerfully by Jean Buridan (ca. 1300–1358), that distinguished the “nominalist” via moderna, the “modern way” of doing philosophy and theology from the second half of the 14th century. The general, distinctive characteristics of this “modern way” will be the discussed in the ninth section. Finally, the concluding tenth section will briefly indicate how the separation of the two viae, in addition to a number of extrinsic social factors, contributed to the disintegration of scholastic discourse, and thereby to the disappearance of the characteristically medieval problem of universals, as well as to the re-mergence of recognizably the same problem in different guises in early modern philosophy.