spatially located or corporeal,” his opponent would reply: First, this is refuted by describing bodies and substances as subsisting in themselves and having no need of a substrate, for this negation entails that affirmation.

Second, they said: We have not equated the negation of a negation with an affirmation. Rather, we have said that the existing thing to which this negative attribute is ascribed is the very thing that hearts recognize as also having this affirmative attribute. We know that this negation cannot apply to anything existent without that affirmation also holding true.

Third, they said: What entails this affirmation is the existent entity whose subsistence in a substrate is denied. It is this existent entity that they have called spatially located and a body.

Fourth—which is the fifth line of argument—they said: One self-subsisting entity does not subsist in another self-subsisting entity, nor can the two occupy the same space. Rather, neither can be where the other is. This is what the speculative theologians mean when they say that bodies do not interpenetrate. When they reported that al-Nazzām held that they do interpenetrate,