  As we noted earlier, philosophers throughout the medieval period are attracted to the view suggested by Aristotle’s Categories that relations (or the items corresponding to our relational concepts) are accidents. Of course, as we also noted, the medievals cannot take this view to be perfectly general, since they also admit cases, especially theological ones, which involve relations but no accidents. But even so, until the fourteenth century, this view is taken to apply so widely that it functions as a kind of paradigm for thinking about relational situations. Thus, if a predication of the form ‘aRb’ is true, it is generally assumed that what makes it true is a pair of individuals, a and b, and a pair of accidents, F and G. As we shall see in the next section, it is within the context of this paradigmatic analysis of relational situations that one of the most hotly disputed and intractable debates of all the Middle Ages arises.