 Boethius’s Porphyrian approach is evident even in the two commentaries on Porphyry’s own Isagoge (an introduction to the Categories which had become accepted as a standard part of the logical curriculum)—one text on which, obviously, Porphyry himself had never commented. Near the beginning of the Isagoge, Porphyry mentions three questions about universals, but declines to discuss them in an introductory work. Do they exist or are they mere concepts? If they exist are they bodily or not, and, if they are not, are they separated from sensible things or do they exist in them? By Boethius’s time, the Greek commentators had developed a standard way of glossing this passage. They explained that universals could be considered as concepts (universals post rem—‘following the thing’), as intrinsic to bodily things (universals in re—‘in the thing’) and as really existing and separate from bodies (universals ante rem—‘before the thing’). In most of his work, Boethius follows this way of thinking about universals (cf. Cross 2012). But here he takes a different approach, turning to a train of thought (1906, 161:14 ff.) which goes back in part to Porphyry himself and, through him, to the great Aristotelian, Alexander of Aphrodisias.