I wrote this essay as a graduate student taking a Mediaeval Philosophy course from Professor Paul Vincent Spade (Ph.D., Toronto) in 1988. I recently re-read it with some nostalgia and some pleasure. It won me the award for best graduate student essay that year, but I make no claims to be an expert on mediaeval philosophy.
The essay opens with a quotation from the Aristotelian H. W. B. Joseph: “Unless the primary Laws of Thought were Laws of things, our thought would be doomed by its very nature to misapprehend the nature of things.”