they said: This borders on denying the self-evident. Whoever maintained that bodies interpenetrate did not intend the meaning whose falsity is self-evident. Rather, al-Nazzām classified the accidents of a body other than motion as bodies, such as color, piercing, and odor. These coexist within a single substrate, and there is no dispute about this; the dispute concerns only calling them bodies. As for a self-subsisting body, no one has said that it interpenetrates another such body. Rather, when it permeates the interstices of another body, it increases that other body’s actual volume.

Since two self-subsisting entities cannot occupy the same place—even if subsistence in oneself means the absence of a substrate—it is evident that each has a place proper to it, namely its spatial domain, or a magnitude proper to it, a body proper to it, or whatever similar expression is used. This is what prevents their occupying the same place and interpenetrating. Otherwise, if both attributes are assumed to be privative, privative attributes cannot prevent positive realities.

The speculative theologians have discussed the reason why one body cannot occupy the same place as another. The Mu'tazilah and a group of