He also cites, apparently with approval, the view of those who held Porphyry's treatise to be not de quinque rebus, but de quinque vocibus.
His small work De exceptionibus was probably written before he became pope; but the Apparatus in quinque libros decretalium, which displays both practical sense and a remarkable mastery of the available materials, was written at Lyons immediately after the council.
Ideas identical with the modern ones were expressed by John Mayow in his Tractatus quinque medico-physici (1674), but his death in 1679 undoubtedly accounts for the neglect of his suggestions by his contemporaries.
He published at Oxford in 1668 two tracts, on respiration and rickets, and in 1674 these were reprinted, the former in an enlarged and corrected form, with three others "De sal-nitro et spiritu nitro - aereo," "De respiratione foetus in utero et ovo," and "De motu musculari et spiritibus animalibus" as Tractatus quinque medico-physici.
If Alexander is responsible for such doctrines as that of the intellectus acquisitus, it is to Porphyry, with his characteristically Platonist preference for the doctrine of universals, and for classification, that we owe the scholastic preoccupation with the realist controversy, and with the quinque votes, i.e.