Se il genere possa essere conservato da una sola specie. Un dibattito parigino nei commenti a Porfirio di fine XIII secolo

The debate presented in this article was born as an ontological problem, stimulated by some passages from Porphyry’s Isagoge, and was transformed, at the end of the 13th century, into a triple problem of a cognitive, semantic and ontological nature, thanks to the contribution of the last of the great Parisian masters of arts, Radulphus Brito. In what follows, we will first try to provide an overview of the questions in which this problem was discussed in the commentaries on Porphyry; second, to show how the terms of the question changed with Radulphus Brito, compared to Simon of Faversham; and finally how the positions of Radulphus Brito were discussed by some of his immediate successors, such as Bartholomew of Bruges and (probably) the Anonymous of Leipzig.