his own thought almost broken away from the earlier ontological context. The nature of distinctness had already begun to harden as early as the late thirteenth century, in part perhaps through a tendency in Platonism to make formal difference primary. In William of Ockham a radical nominalism implied in principle the impossibility of the Aristotelian metaphysical analysis as it was developed by St. Thomas. For mandatory for such an analysis is the possibility of an analogical diversity among the