so they excluded these categories from logic, as did those who followed Ibn Sīnā’s approach, such as Abū Hāmid, al-Suhrawardī who was executed, al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, and others. These are the “ten categories,” which they designate as substance, quantity, quality, place, time, relation, position, possession, acting, and being acted upon. They have been brought together in two lines of verse:
Zayd, tall and black, the son of Mālik, … was reclining in his house yesterday;
In his hand a sword—he drew it, and it was drawn: … these are ten categories in full.
Most people, both his followers and others, rejected the restriction of accidents to nine genera, saying: “There is no proof for this.” They maintain that these can be reduced to three genera or to other numbers.
They classified substances into “five kinds”: body, intellect, soul, matter, and form. Body is a substance perceived by the senses, while the remaining kinds are intelligible substances. Yet the evidence they offer to establish intelligible substances establishes their existence only in minds, not in external reality. These are what they call “immaterial intelligibles.”
They say that substances are divided into material and immaterial substances. Material substances are those that subsist in matter—that is, prime matter, which is body—while immaterial substances are those abstracted from matter. What they call immaterial entities have their origin in these notions