alive, He would possess their opposites,’ a proper examination of this claim depends on explaining the nature of the two opposites”—meaning two mutually exclusive things.

He mentioned the philosophers’ well-known fourfold classification of opposition: negation and affirmation, privation and possession, correlation, and contrariety. According to them, the opposition between knowledge and ignorance, and between blindness and sight, belongs to the category of privation and possession.

In their terminology, “possession” means any positive quality that can belong to a thing: either by virtue of its genus, as with a human being, since sight can belong to its genus, namely animals; or by virtue of its species, as with Zayd’s ability to write, since this is possible for the human species; or by virtue of the individual, as with a man’s beard, since this is possible for a man.

He said: “The privation opposed to it is the absence of this possession.”