as used entail an encounter between the one who raises and the one to whom it is raised, and the presence of what is raised with the one who raises it. Likewise, what is extracted is present with that from which it is extracted, and what is abstracted with that from which it is abstracted.

“Without a relation of encounter and presence—or whatever you wish to call it—between the soul and the body, the body would not be its instrument; nor, without such a relation to the objects of perception, would the soul perceive them. If it did not perceive them, it could not apprehend them intellectually as either universal or particular. How could it be otherwise, when the object perceived is one and the same in meaning, and universality attaches to it after it has been perceived, by virtue of a consideration, relation, and connection—its resemblance and likeness to many things—while it remains the very same thing? Considered in itself, it is neither universal nor particular. It is perceived only insofar as it exists, not insofar as it is universal or particular. Universality and particularity attach to it in the mind after it has been perceived. Thus, whatever perceives the universal necessarily perceives the particular, for the universal is identical to the particular in its essence and meaning, though not in the relations and connections by which it becomes universal or particular.”

[Ibn Taymiyyah’s Commentary]

The response is:

What Abū al-Barakāt has mentioned demonstrates Ibn Sīnā’s inconsistency. He claimed that something spatial cannot stand in a relation of presence or absence to something that is not in a place, and stated that the matter was clear and simple.

Yet this contradicts his statement that the soul is not a body, even though the body is present to it.

This contradiction, however, establishes the falsity of one of his two statements: either his statement that the soul is not a body, or his statement: