  In a more traditional vein, Metochites wrote paraphrases of all of Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy; his proudest accomplishment, however, was his monumental Introduction to the study of Ptolemaic astronomy. The superiority of mathematics (including astronomy) to natural philosophy is in Metochites’ view warranted by the higher degree of reality of mathematical objects, which he seems (especially in his hexameter poem On Mathematics) to have conceived of as being ultimately derived by procession from intelligible objects, even if he sometimes speaks of them as the products of abstraction from sensibles. The two conceptions are probably intended to be complementary, as indeed they are in many Neoplatonic writers.