 This seems to mean, not just that the study of things that are separate and unmoved belongs to first philosophy, but that first philosophy is defined as the science of things that are separate and unmoved. How then is first philosophy the science of being and its universal attributes? One possible answer would be that first philosophy is by definition the science of God (or perhaps the science of separate unmoved things including God), and that it studies being and its universal attributes instrumentally, because starting with them and investigating their causes is the only way we have to come to knowledge of God. (This might imply that those aspects of the study of being and its universal attributes which are not useful for drawing conclusions about God would not belong to first philosophy.) But Fârâbî gives a different answer, by reinterpreting what Aristotle means by “separate”. This is the second way that Fârâbî tries to resolve the tension between ontological and theological descriptions of metaphysics.