The philosophical content of this chapter consists in Maimonides’ strong refutation — indeed, scorn — of the naive religious idea that we should expect an all-powerful God to be able to make the impossible possible. Some examples of the logical impossibilities that are not in God’s power include:

  • for one substratum to have two opposite properties at the same time
  • for substance to become accident or vice versa
  • “that God should produce a being like Himself, or annihilate, corporify, or change Himself.”
  • “to produce a square with a diagonal equal to one of the sides”

on these matters, he proclaims agreement between himself and “the philosophers”. But there are some points of disagreement on this score.

The first disagreement cited by Maimonides refers to an obscure theological question answered in the affirmative by the Mutazilah: can an accident exist independent of substance? Maimonides does not reveal his own opinion, but pointedly says that the former “have not arrived at this conclusion by philosophical research alone, but it was mainly by the desire to defend certain religious principles, which speculation had greatly shaken.” While Maimonides does not directly criticize such accomodationism, it appears that he does not agree with the methodology of the Mutazilah here, consistent with his general criticism of the mutakallemin.

The second disagreement refers to creation out of nihilo;

the creation of corporeal things, otherwise than from a substance, is possible according to our view, whilst the philosophers say that it is impossible.

These trivial points are followed by a more careful and nuanced paragraph about what it means to call something impossible. I should probably check the Pines translation and think about this more carefully. He says:

I wonder whether this gate of research is open, so that all may freely enter, and whilst one imagines a thing and considers it possible, another is at liberty to assert that such a thing is impossible by its very nature; or whether the gate is closed and guarded by certain rules, so that we are able to decide with certainty whether a thing is physically impossible. I should also like to know, in the latter case, whether imagination or reason has to examine and test objects as to their being possible or not; likewise how things imagined, and things conceived intellectually, are to be distinguished from each other. For it occurs that we consider a thing as physically possible, and then some one objects, or we ourselves fear that our opinion is only the result of imagination, and not that of reason. In such a case it would be desirable to ascertain whether there exists some faculty to distinguish between imagination and intellect, [and if so,] whether this faculty is different from both, or whether it is part of the intellect itself to distinguish between intellectual and imaginary objects. All this requires investigation, but it does not belong to the theme of this chapter.

What stands out from this passage is Maimonides’ belief that the imagination is not a useful tool for deciding whether something is possible or impossible; only the intellect can ascertain this for sure.