 As is evident, the Italian master is aware of the paradox entailed by the standard realist account of human knowledge and his theory is a serious attempt to avoid it. Paul refuses Aquinas’s and Giles’s views since they imply that the intellectual apprehension of the universal essence, because of its two-fold relation to the phantasm, at once presupposes the sense-apprehension of the individual thing (which instantiates that essence) and is presupposed by the intellectual apprehension of the individual thing. Since at the level of sense-apprehension of individual items the human soul, through the cogitativa, is already able to recognize the substance (of those individual things), the intellectual apprehension cannot in any way add new information on the res at issue and must be totally identical with the sense-apprehension. As a consequence, instead of elaborating an interpretative pattern of human knowledge based on the form of the spiral, where the same things come back to our soul at different moments in the process of abstraction, Paul tacitly develops in an original way some suggestions drawn from Walter Burley’s prologue to his last commentary on the Physics. In criticizing Averroes’s thesis that the quidditas of material things is the primary object of our understanding and the material and individual things themselves a secondary object, Paul explains our knowledge in terms of a sort of straight line which proceeds from the most superficial to the deepest levels of reality, and states that our intellect is equally apt to receive both universal and singular species, and, as a consequence, that it is apt to know both common essences and singular things (In De an., III, t.c. 11, fol. 136va-b).