 As we have seen, within Burley’s new theory of understanding the singular can be placed either at the beginning of the chain of knowledge, as its origin, or at its end, as its result. In both cases, what remains unchanged is that intellective knowledge is at stake and not simply sense knowledge. This means that for Burley, the singular is one of the primary objects of the cognitive activity of the human intellect. This result is historically significant because it brings Burley’s later theory of knowledge into line with the other great epistemological doctrines of the fourteenth century, almost all of which were aimed at re-evaluating the singular as a possible object of knowledge. The way for this was prepared by the ontological turn in Burley’s last commentary on the Physics: the move from an ontology developed according to the canons of moderate realism to the radically realist ontology of macro-objects, based on a real distinction between universals and singulars and among the ten Aristotelian categories. Such a conception derives from the assumption of a hermeneutical principle which is clearly formulated by Burley for the first time in the latter work, where he observes that the causes of a particular effect must be particular as well, and those of a universal effect must be universal. Accordingly, he denies that a universal cause can have a particular effect and vice-versa, and therefore that what is singular can be directly constituted by those universal forms placed above it in the hierarchy of categorial predication (cf. fol. 9rb–va).