Yet he had said:

“He intellectually apprehends them in their individual reality.”

Thus, at one point he calls knowledge of determinate bodies intellection, while at another he says that it is sensation or imagination, not intellection. At one point he affirms that He knows them, while at another he denies this because it is sensation, not intellection.

The issue here is not whether He apprehends them as changing or unchanging, but whether He knows determinate bodies as determinate individuals, and whether this is intellection or sensation. He has affirmed that He intellectually apprehends them, yet has explained the case of other things on grounds that entail that He does not intellectually apprehend these either. This is a clear contradiction.

There is no doubt that his argument here denies only that He knows them as changing, lest His essence be subject to change. He then explains this by saying that He does not know objects of sensation. Elsewhere, however, he said:

“Every sensible form and every imagined form is apprehended by the perceiver only through a divisible instrument, and that which apprehends particulars is not an intellect but a corporeal faculty.”

Yet here he has stated that the Necessary Existent [knows] perfect corporeal beings in their individual reality. One of two alternatives must therefore follow: either He is a body that apprehends them through a corporeal faculty, or He does not apprehend them, as Aristotle maintained. Or else bodies can be apprehended through a non-corporeal faculty, as Abū al-Barakāt maintained. Abū al-Barakāt contradicted him in this section, and, Allah willing, we shall quote their respective statements.

Ibn Sīnā’s account of knowledge is thus contradictory: he affirms that He knows perfect existents in their individual reality, and this contradicts everything he has said in denying