non-existent—for our investigation here concerns what is necessary in itself and what is possible in itself, whereas the study of logic proceeds otherwise.

I said:
The objection he recounts from the logicians had already been levelled against him by Ibn Rushd and others, even though Ibn Rushd came after him.

The reason is that in the language of their philosophical forebears—Aristotle and his school—the term “possible” applies only to the state of non-existence. Accordingly, they say that possibility needs a subject in which it inheres before the possible thing comes to be; hence their dictum that every originated entity is preceded by the possibility of non-existence. Because possibility is an affirmative quality, it must reside in some underlying matter.

Those early philosophers did not divide existents into “necessary” and “possible”; that distinction was introduced only by Ibn Sīnā and his followers. In fact, for the earlier thinkers the universe itself belonged to the category of the necessary, not the possible. Thus the word “possible” has come to be used in two different senses. Ibn Sīnā refused to treat the matter as a mere verbal equivocation; instead he seized upon the common element, namely the capacity of a thing both to exist and not to exist, setting aside its present state, which is the cause that determines one of the two alternatives. There is no doubt that this characterization applies to the thing in both conditions. Yet if by “possible” one means “that which may come to exist,” that is, what will be existent in the future, then only a non-existent thing capable of receiving existence can be so described.

What he has stated leads to two erroneous conclusions: