The body is therefore the only thing inside its limit, yielding a sense of 'one' as having no partner within that limit.

When Fârâbî says that there are senses of “one” which do not presuppose any plurality and which have no opposite except a bare contradictory—so that there is no sense of “many” opposite to these senses of “one”, although there is a sense of “many” arising from each such sense of “one”—he is interested above all in the sense of “one” as “circumscribed by a quiddity” (first introduced #17). Fârâbî does not assume that the reader will already be familiar with this analysis of a special sense of “on