with a text: "Sententia de universalibus secundum magistrum R." ("Notices et extr. de quelques manuscr. lat.", V, Paris, 1892, 224), but this is a conjecture. We have as evidences of his doctrine texts of Anselm, Abelard, John of Salisbury, and an anonymous epigram. His share in the history of ideas and especially his nominalism have been exaggerated, his celebrity being far more due to his theological tritheism. Roscelin's nominalism, or Sententia Vocum According to Otto of Freisingen Roscelin primus nostris temporibus sententiam vocum instituit (Gesta Friderici imp. in Monum. German. History: Script., XX, 376) (Literally: "was the first in our times to institute the opinion/theory of words"), but the chronicler of the "Historia Francia" (cf. Bouquet, "Recueil des hist. des Gaules et de la France", XII, Paris, 1781, 3, b, c) mentions before him a "magister Johannes", whose personality is much discussed and who has not yet been definitively identified. What constitutes the sententia vocum? To judge of it we have besides the texts mentioned above which bear directly on Roscelin an exposition of the treatise De generibus et speciebus (thirteenth century), wrongly attributed to Abelard by Victor Cousin. The "sententia vocum" was one of the anti-Realist solutions of the problem of universals accepted by the early Middle Ages. Resuming Porphyry's alternative (mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem sive subsistent sive in nudis intellectibus posita sint) the first medieval philosophers regarded genera and species (substance, corporeity, animality, humanity) either as things or as having no existence, and applying to this alternative a terminology of Boethius, they derived thence either res (things) or voces (words). To the nominalists universals were voces 'voices', which means: (1) above all that universals are not res, that is that only the individual exists: nam cum habeat eorum sententia nihil esse praeter individuum ... (De gener. et spec., 524). Nominalism was essentially anti-Realist. (2) that universals are merely words, flatus vocis, e.g., the word "homo", divisible into syllables, consonants and vowels. Fuit autem, nemini magistri nostri Roscellini tam insana sententia ut nullam rem partibus constare vellet, sed sicut solis vocibus species, ita et partes ascridebat (Abelard, Liber divisionum, ed. Cousin, 471); "[...] Illi utique dialectici, qui non nisi flatum vocis putant universalis esse substantias, et qui colorem non aliud queunt intellegere quam corpus, nec sapientiam hominis aliud quam animam, prorsus a spiritualium quaestionum disputatione sunt exsufflandi." (Anselm, De Incarnatione Verbi, p. 285. Opera Omnia, vol.