 Depending on which of these items (universal features of singular things, their universal concepts, or their universal names) they regarded as the primary, really existing universals, it is customary to classify medieval authors as being realists, conceptualists, or nominalists, respectively. The realists are supposed to be those who assert the existence of real universals in and/or before particular things, the conceptualists those who allow universals only, or primarily, as concepts of the mind, whereas nominalists would be those who would acknowledge only, or primarily, universal words. But this rather crude classification does not adequately reflect the genuine, much more subtle differences of opinion between medieval thinkers. (No wonder one often finds in the secondary literature distinctions between, “moderate” and “extreme” versions of these crudely defined positions.) In the first place, nearly all medieval thinkers agreed on the existence of universals before things in the form of divine ideas existing in the divine  mind,[5]  but all of them denied their existence in the form of mind-independent, real, eternal entities originally posited by Plato. Furthermore, medieval thinkers also agreed that particular things have certain features which the human mind is able to comprehend in a universal fashion, and signify by means of universal terms. As we shall see, their disagreements rather concerned the types of the relationships that hold between the particular things, their individual, yet universally comprehensible features, the universal concepts of the mind, and the universal terms of our languages, as well as the ontological status of, and distinctions between, the individualized features of the things and the universal concepts of the mind. Nevertheless, the distinction between “realism” and “nominalism”, especially, when it is used to refer to the distinction between the radically different ways of doing philosophy and theology in late-medieval times, is quite justifiable, provided we clarify what really separated these ways, as I hope to do in the later sections of this article.