Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

I say:
and places of the world. The non-existence, however,
preceding the world and the initial term of its existence are
essential realities, a substitution or a change of which cannot
be imagined. Nor can it be imagined that the non-existence
which is supposed to occur at the disappearance of the
world and which follows the world can become the nonexistence
preceding it. The initial and final terms of the
world’s existence are permanent essential terms, in which no
change can be imagined through the change of the
subjective relation to them, in contrast with ‘above’ and
‘below’. Therefore we philosophers, indeed, are justified in
saying that in the world there is neither ‘above’ nor ‘below’,
but you theologians have not the right to assert that the
existence of the world has neither a ‘before’ nor an ‘after’.
And when the existence of ‘before’ and ‘after’ is proved,
time cannot mean anything but what is apprehended through
the anterior and the posterior.
This answer given in the name of the philosophers is extremely
unsound. It amounts to saying that ‘above’ and ‘below’ are relative to us
and that therefore imagination can treat them as an infinite sequence, but
that the sequence of ‘before’ and ‘after’ does not rest on imagination-for
there is here no subjective relation-but is a ~ purely rational concept. This
means that the order of above and below in a thing may be reversed in
imagination, but that the privation before an event and the privation after
an event, its before and its after, are not interchangeable for imagination.
But by giving this answer the problem is not solved, for the philosophers
think that i there exists a natural above; to which light things move and a
natural below to which heavy things move, or else the heavy and the light
would be relative and exist by convention, and they hold that in
imagination the limit of a body, having by nature its place above, may end
either in occupied or in empty space. And this argument is in- valid as a
justification of the philosophers for two reasons. First, that the
philosophers assume an absolute above and an absolute below, but no
absolute beginning and no absolute end; secondly that their opponents
may object that it is not the fact of their being relative that causes the
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