As for scholars of language, their use of “contradictories” is broader than all these senses, encompassing mutually incompatible things: whatever negates another thereby contradicts, removes, and invalidates it, and is therefore called its contradictory.

The Peripatetic philosophers have another convention concerning things opposed by negation and affirmation, which they call “the opposition of privation and possession.” This means denying something of a subject naturally capable of possessing it. For example, the absence of hearing, sight, and speech in a living creature is called blindness, deafness, and muteness, because a living creature is capable of either condition. By contrast, the absence of these faculties in an inanimate object, such as a wall, is not called blindness, deafness, or muteness in their terminology, because a wall is incapable of possessing them.

They then used this distinction as a means of denying both contradictories of the Creator, Most High. The early Muslim generations, the leading scholars, and those who affirm the divine attributes argued that if the Creator, glorified is He, were not described as possessing hearing, sight, speech, and other attributes of perfection, He would necessarily have to be described as possessing their opposites—deafness, blindness, muteness, and other attributes of deficiency.

These philosophers replied:

“Blindness and sight, and muteness and speech, are opposed as privation and possession. This means denying something of a subject naturally capable of possessing it, such as a living creature. But whatever is incapable of possessing it, such as an inanimate object, is described as possessing neither blindness nor sight, neither speech nor muteness, neither hearing nor deafness, and neither life nor death.”

There are several ways to answer this: