What Is a Thing, Really? The Strange World of Robert Alyngton

Imagine you’re looking at your dog. You can see it, pet it, call it by name. But here’s a strange question: what is it, exactly? Is it just the furry body? Is it something called “dog-ness” that happens to be in that body? Is it a collection of smaller parts? And when you say your dog is “brown” or “friendly”—are those things real in the same way the dog is real?

These questions might seem like overthinking. But for a 14th-century philosopher named Robert Alyngton, they were urgent puzzles that led him to build a picture of reality stranger than you might expect. We don’t know much about Alyngton’s life—he taught at Oxford, preached some controversial ideas, and died in 1398—but what he wrote about categories, substances, and universals is a wild ride through medieval metaphysics.

The Basic Puzzle: What’s Really There?

Here’s the problem Alyngton was trying to solve. When you look around, you see individual things: this tree, that rock, your friend. But you also notice that many things share properties—they’re all “trees” or all “rocks” or all “human.” So which is more real: the individual thing, or the shared nature that makes it what it is?

A group called Nominalists said only individual things exist. “Tree” is just a word we use to group similar things; there’s no actual “tree-ness” floating around in the world. Another group, the Realists, said the shared natures are real too—they exist, just in a different way than individual things do.

Alyngton was a hardcore Realist. He thought the world is packed full of real, mind-independent things at many levels. But this led him to some tricky conclusions.

Being and Categories: Sorting Everything

Alyngton started with an idea from Aristotle: everything that exists can be sorted into ten categories. The most important is substance—the basic “what-it-is” of a thing. Then there are nine kinds of accidents: quantity (how much), quality (what kind), relation (how it relates to other things), and so on.

For Alyngton, these categories aren’t just ways of talking. They’re real divisions in reality itself. A substance is really different from its qualities, really different from its quantities, really different from its relations. Each category picks out a genuinely distinct kind of being.

But here’s the twist: Alyngton thought that one single thing—say, your dog—contains all these different kinds of being at once. The dog itself is a substance. Its brownness is a quality. Its weight is a quantity. Its being “your dog” (rather than a stray) is a relation. And all of these are really distinct from each other, even though they exist together in one thing.

The Strange Case of Universals

This is where Alyngton’s view gets really interesting. He believed in three kinds of universals:

Ideal universals — the patterns or ideas in God’s mind that everything else is based on
Formal universals — the shared natures that actually exist in individual things (like “dog-ness” existing in every dog)
Intentional universals — the mental concepts in our minds that represent those shared natures

The controversial claim was that formal universals—the shared natures—actually exist in the world, not just in our minds. “Dog-ness” is really there, in every dog, making each dog a dog. But this doesn’t mean there’s a separate “super-dog” floating around. The universal is really identical with each individual dog, but formally distinct from it.

This part gets complicated, but here’s what it accomplishes: it explains why dogs are similar to each other (they share the same real nature) while still being different individuals (because each dog also has its own particular existence). It also explains how our knowledge can be about something real—we’re not just making up categories; we’re discovering the actual structure of the world.

What Makes a Thing a Thing?

Alyngton spent a lot of time thinking about substance—what it really means for something to be a “thing” in the strongest sense. He looked at seven different opinions before settling on his own view.

His conclusion: a primary substance (like your dog or your friend) is characterized not by being able to have accidents (like color or size), but by being able to underlie potency and act. This is a technical way of saying that a substance has the capacity to change while remaining the same thing. A dog can grow, get sick, learn tricks, get older—but it’s still the same dog. That capacity for change-and-continuity is what makes something a substance.

Secondary substances—like “humanity” or “dog-ness”—are real but in a different way. They’re forms that exist in primary substances as their essential components. Humanity doesn’t exist on its own; it exists in Socrates, in you, in your cousin. But it’s still real.

The Web of Relations

One of Alyngton’s most original ideas was about relations. How does something like “being taller than” or “being the father of” actually exist? For most medieval philosophers, a relation was an accident that exists in one thing and just points toward another.

Alyngton disagreed. He thought a relation is a real form that exists in both related things at once—just in different ways. When you’re taller than your friend, the “taller-than” relation actually exists in both of you simultaneously. It’s like a two-ended rope connecting two substances.

This meant that relations are real things in the world, not just ways of thinking. And it meant that a relation can change in one substance without that substance changing at all—if your friend grows taller than you, the relation changes, but you didn’t do anything.

The Radical Move: Making Logic About Reality

The boldest part of Alyngton’s system was his claim about second intentions. These are concepts we use to talk about our concepts—things like “species,” “genus,” “individual,” “universal.” Most philosophers thought these were just mental tools we use to organize our thoughts.

Alyngton said no: second intentions are real features of the world itself. When we say something is “an individual,” we’re not just applying a mental label—we’re describing a real property of that thing. “Individuality” exists in the world.

This led to a paradox. If “individual” is a real property shared by all individuals, then there must be a common nature of being-an-individual. But that’s self-contradictory: how can all individuals share a nature of being individual? A shared nature is universal, but individuality is supposed to be what makes things not universal.

Alyngton solved this by arguing that terms like “individual” aren’t really common terms at all—they’re what he called “atomic terms,” like proper names or pointing gestures. They don’t name a shared nature; they just pick out one specific thing. But this solution shows how far he was willing to go to keep his view consistent.

What It All Means

Alyngton’s world is one where everything is connected by real forms and relations, where every individual contains universals within itself, and where the way we talk about reality mirrors the actual structure of reality. It’s a view that takes our ordinary experience—that things are both individual and similar, that they have properties, that they relate to each other—and treats it as literally true of the world.

Was he right? Philosophers still argue about this. His view has the advantage of taking our experience seriously, but it multiplies the kinds of things that exist in ways that can seem extravagant. The Nominalists, who wanted to reduce reality to just individual things, thought he was creating unnecessary entities.

But Alyngton’s system shows something important: when you take questions about what exists seriously, you end up with a picture of reality that’s more complex—and stranger—than common sense suggests. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe reality really is stranger than we think.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Substance	The basic “what-it-is” of a thing; the primary bearer of properties
Accident	A property or feature that exists in a substance (like color, size, relation)
Universal	A shared nature or quality that exists in many individual things
Formal universal	The actual shared nature that exists in individual things (like “dog-ness” in dogs)
Relation	A real connection between two or more substances
Second intention	A concept about concepts (like “species” or “individual”) that Alyngton thought was real in the world
Primary substance	An individual thing (like Socrates or your dog)
Secondary substance	A universal nature (like “humanity”) that exists in primary substances

Key People

Robert Alyngton (died 1398) — An Oxford philosopher and theologian who built one of the most extreme realist systems of the Middle Ages, arguing that universals and relations are really existing things in the world.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) — The ancient Greek philosopher whose work on categories and substances gave Alyngton his starting point.
John Wyclif (c. 1328–1384) — A controversial Oxford philosopher and reformer whose ideas about being and universals heavily influenced Alyngton.
Walter Burley (c. 1275–1344) — Another Oxford realist whose work on categories Alyngton drew from and modified.
William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) — The main opponent of Alyngton’s kind of realism; he argued that universals are just mental concepts, not real things.

Things to Think About

If universals like “dog-ness” are real, where exactly do they exist? In each dog separately? In some kind of “dog-space”? What would it mean for one thing to be in many places at once?
Alyngton thought that when something changes (like your friend growing taller than you), a real relation changes in you even though you haven’t changed at all. Does that seem right? Can something change about you without you doing anything?
If “individuality” is a real property shared by all individuals, we get a paradox. Can you think of a way out besides the one Alyngton chose? What if we just admitted that some terms don’t name real features of the world?
Why does it matter whether universals are real or not? If we all agree that dogs are similar to each other, does it make any practical difference whether that similarity is “really there” or just in our minds?

Where This Shows Up

Arguments about identity — When people debate whether someone who undergoes major changes (like a medical procedure, a conversion, or aging) is still “the same person,” they’re wrestling with the same questions about what makes something a substance.
The problem of categories in science — Biologists still argue about whether species are real categories in nature or just human-made classifications. This is the same debate Alyngton was having, just with better data.
Computer science and object-oriented programming — When programmers design “classes” that define what objects are and how they behave, they’re dealing with questions about universals and particulars that Alyngton would recognize.
Religious debates — Questions about whether God, angels, or souls are substances or something else were central to medieval philosophy and still come up in theology today.