He said:

“This is a sophistical view held by people notorious for sophistry.

“As for the second approach adopted by the theologians to establish the possibility of vision, it is the approach chosen by Abū al-Maʿālī in his book known as al-Irshād (The Guidance). It may be summarized as follows: the senses perceive only things themselves. What distinguishes existing things from one another consists of states, not entities in their own right, and so the senses do not perceive these states. They perceive only the thing itself, which is nothing other than the existence common to all existing things. Thus, the senses perceive a thing only insofar as it exists.”

I say:

This argument is of the same kind as the first, but this one rests on the position of those who affirm states, whereas the other rests on the view of those who deny them. Yet presenting it in this way involves a contradiction: he maintains that states are not seen and that only existence is seen, even though existence is itself a state according to those who affirm states. Nevertheless, the implication is that the senses perceive the shared state—namely, existence—rather than what is distinctive to each thing.

Ibn Rushd then said:

“All this is utterly unsound. One of the clearest demonstrations of the unsoundness of this claim is that, if sight perceived things merely because they exist, it could not distinguish white from black, for things are not differentiated by that