I was pleasantly surprised to come across a reference in the Oxford History of Western Philosophy in the Medieval History section by Paul Vincent Space (p87) to the strongly 'realist' ontological theory of essences held by the 11th century theologian and philosopher Peter Abelard's teacher William of Champeaux, at one time master of the cathedral school at Paris and later of the monastic school at the Abbey of St Victor outside Paris. William held in effect that Socrates is a kind of physical 'layer-cake', built up of successive physical ingredients: substantiality, bodiliness, life, animality, humanity, Greekness, and so on-each subsequent ingredient narrowing or specifying its predecessors. The individual, Socrates, is the sum total of all these ingredients. What makes this a 'realist' view, in terms of the definition of a universal given in Boethius's second commentary in Porphyry, is the claim that if one begins with Socrates and Plato, say, and mentally removes all the ingredients after 'humanity', one ends up with one humanity common to Socrates and Plato - not two humanities, one for each of them.

This theory, which I have never heard of before though far more realist and less physiologically detailed and more abstract and reificational for my modern nominalist  tastes is remarkably congruent in a completely opposite mirrored way with my theory of the strictly physical Gesamtsumme or modalic nexus, which holds that: "

That which exists, and the 'existential modalities' or the way that an entity exists, is precisely the same thing."  

So for William the individual, Socrates, was a layer-cake of abstract essences, wereas for me he was a Battenburg cake of wholly material existential states and modes.

For a strict nominalist such as I  an entity exists in exact correspondence to the current states and modalities of its corporeal molecular-based, mereologically constituent variables, together with their currently transmogrifying intrinsic and extrinsic reciprocations.

     The real or sentential (ideative) extantal subject (nominatum)  is that which equates or corresponds with the entitative object named by the signifier - the name or noun by which it is identified.

   The real or sentential entity that corresponds to the definite article and signifier: " the man" is the componential assemblage or conglomerate of human existential constituents as modified and commuted by their ever-changing states and modalities. That which the physical tradition calls the "essence" or the *properties* of man" is intrinsically that which exists as the seething similitude of requisite physical and mental event-based somatic equivalences that occur to the quantum-based, mini-entities of which the macro entity in its completeness consists.

     It has been said, and I believe it to be the case, that in the act of naming an actual rather than a fictitious entity or un-individuated entity, the name employed to identify the subject or extantal imbuant of the sentence only has a true identificatory and validatory power of correspondence if the entity so signified actually exists in space and time. If this is the case, then an entity so named and which truly corresponds to its designator can be said to be a rigid designatory modalic compendium or faithful modalic nexus of all the physical 'properties' of the designatum. Do we assume the actual existence of a subject-predicate reality because our brains - through the medium of language only allows us to hive off one or two or more descriptive existential modalities of an entity per sentence?

     Whilst I am aware of the redness of the apple before me on my desk, and can write about it on my keyboard, I am also vitally aware of all the other modalities of the apple, which are crying out for my attention and of the plentitude of unexpressed states, and manners, which communally constitute its modalic nexus. It would take a speaker a thousand years to even begin to address and reconcile and individuate each modalic component through the dichotomised mechanism of the subject-predicate relationship. Every entity has an inbuilt existential integrity, and can never be truthfully predicatively described in any other way than that in which it actually exists, as mediated through the sense organs of a human, with the meaning transacted by the brain. Anything falsely predicated or attributed to a subject which is accepted both by the addressor and addressee is an ontological challenge to the rigidity of the designatory modalic compendium and renders the nexus de-rigified and liable to rejection as the true referent of the signifier.

                    William of Champeaux From The Catholic Encyclopaedia.

A twelfth-century Scholastic, philosopher, and theologian, b. at Champeaux, near Melun, in the neighbourhood of Paris, about the year 1070; d. at Châlons-sur-Marne, 1121.

     After having been a pupil of Anselm of Laon, he began in 1103 his career as teacher at the cathedral school of Paris. In 1108, owing chiefly to Abelard's successful attempts to criticize his realistic doctrine of universals, he retired to the Abbey of St. Victor and there continued to give lessons which, no doubt, influenced the mystic school known as that of St. Victor. In 1114 he was made Bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne. Portions of his work "De origine animae" and of a "Liber sententiarum", as well as a dialogue entitled "Dialogus seu altercatio cujusdam Christiani et Judaei", have come down to us.

     On the problem of universals William held successively a variety of opinions. All of these, however, are on the side exaggerated Realism and opposed both to the Nominalism of Roscelin and to the modified Nominalism of Abelard. In his treatise on the origin of the soul he definitely rejects the theory known as Traducianism and maintains that each and every human soul originates from the creative act of God. Among his contemporaries he enjoyed a very great reputation for learning and sanctity. Among his contemporaries he enjoyed a very great reputation for learning and sanctity. He was, moreover, looked upon by the conservative thinkers of that age as the ablest champion of orthodoxy. His creationist doctrine is his chief title to distinction as a Scholastic philosopher.