commentators and their medieval readers, and they had still further reasons of their own to take the problem seriously. Unlike most philosophers nowadays, they followed Aristotle’s lead in believing that knowledge in the strict and proper sense—the kind of knowledge involved in scientific understanding—is universal in scope.3 So, for them, answering Porphyry’s questions was an urgent task in the study of knowledge, or epistemology, as well as in philosophy of language.
