“Moreover, if place is non-positive, a substance’s presence in a non-positive reality (1) does not amount to its presence in something nonexistent—in the sense that it is within nonexistence. If place is a substance, then, according to the first group, substance is divided into that which resists whatever enters it and obstructs it—this being the kind that cannot undergo interpenetration—and into (2) that which offers no resistance and cannot be displaced, namely place. A resistant substance (3) can interpenetrate one that offers no resistance; this is what it means for a substance to be in a place.

“According to the second group, however, a substance’s presence in place—which is an accident—has a meaning different from the meaning (4) intended when they speak of an accident being present in a substance, namely, inhering in it.”

I say:

This matter has been discussed at length elsewhere, where it was shown that al-Rāzī’s statement, “They agreed that a substance’s presence in a spatial location is a positive reality,” is not as he claimed. Rather, it should be said: If by his statement that a substance’s presence in a spatial location is a positive reality he means that it is a positive attribute subsisting in the entity occupying that location, they did not agree upon this. Indeed, this is not even the position of their most exacting authorities. Rather, according to them, occupying a spatial location is nothing over and above the essence of that which occupies it.

Judge Abū Bakr ibn al-Bāqillānī said:

“The entity occupying a spatial location is the body, or that which possesses some measure of spatial extension, and that in whose location no other substance exists” (5).