the Necessary Existent is not said to “not negate,” in the course of discussing his argument for denying corporeality and the question of whether every spatial locus is necessarily existent or not. This is the philosophers’ method, which he expounded and judged weak. Within it, he raised an objection: “We do not concede that necessity is a positive reality.” In reply, he says: “As for his statement, ‘We do not concede that necessity is a positive reality,’ we say: two considerations demonstrate this.”

He mentioned one of them, then said: “The second is that what is understood by necessity is entitlement to existence. We know self-evidently that entitlement to existence is a positive attribute, just as we know self-evidently that a body’s presence in a direction is a positive reality. Indeed, this is even clearer in the former case, because a body’s presence in a direction consists in a particular relation between the body and that direction, while direction is something posited