 But, as he admits, mathematics too “is higher than the science of nature since its subjects are abstracted from matters”: so why doesn’t it count as metaphysics? Aristotle in Metaphysics VI,1 says that mathematics falls short of being first philosophy because its objects, although unchanging, do not exist separately but rather are thought in abstraction from the things they really exist in, whereas the objects of first philosophy are not merely thought in abstraction but really exist separately. Fârâbî takes this up, and, like all ancient and medieval interpreters, takes “abstraction” and “separation” to mean abstraction and separation from matter. It makes sense to say that God exists really separated from matter and triangles don’t. But Fârâbî thinks that the objects of metaphysics include not only God but also being and unity. Why should being and unity be any more “separate” than triangles are? Here Fârâbî reinterprets the notion of separation. Some of the objects of metaphysics, like God, “are things that have no existence at all in natural things”. But others, like being and its universal attributes, “are things that exist in natural things but are imagined as abstracted from them”, and are to that extent like mathematical objects; but, unlike mathematical objects, they