ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Abū al-Hasan al-Ashʿarī, Judge Abū Bakr, Abū al-Husayn al-Basrī, Muhammad ibn al-Haytham, Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī, Abū al-Wafāʾ ibn ʿAqīl, Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī, and others refute the philosophers’ methods upon which they base their negation. Some refute their logical principles; their division of attributes into essential and accidental, and of accidental attributes into those necessary to the essence and those merely incidental to it; their claim that some attributes necessarily belonging to a thing are essential and included within its essence, while others are accidental and lie outside its essence; and their grounding of the doctrine of the oneness of the Necessary Existent—a doctrine whose substance is the denial of attributes—on these principles.

In making this division, they posit that the essences of species exist in external reality over and above individual existent things. This is not the position of those who say, “The nonexistent is a thing.” The latter affirm entities subsisting in nonexistence that can receive individual existence, whereas the former affirm universal essences, not individual ones.

Aristotle and his followers affirm these essences only as accompanying individual existent things, not as separate from them. Plato’s followers, however, affirm them as separate and claim that they have neither beginning nor end, while Pythagoras’s followers affirm abstract numbers.

What these thinkers affirm exists only in the mind, though they suppose that it exists in external reality. Their division of definitions into real, essential definitions and descriptive or verbal definitions—or their division of what serves to identify a thing into definition and description—is based on this distinction.

The great majority of Muslim speculative thinkers, and others besides, have rejected this and demonstrated the flaws in