Albert the Great and his Arabic Sources : Medieval Science between Inheritance and Emergence

Abstract

Albert the Great created a new programme of science in the thirteenth-century Latin world by extensively commenting upon Aristotle’s philosophical corpus and supplementing that corpus with works of his own wherever he saw gaps. What were the preconditions for the emergence of such a comprehensively new scientific agenda and its centuries of success at the University of Paris and Dominican study houses across Europe? One answer is found in the rich Arabic sources that Albert had at his disposal in Latin translation, including Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, as well as Isaac Israeli, Maimonides, and more. Never before in the history of Albert scholarship has there been a collected volume that examines this inheritance from the Arabic-speaking lands in its role as a major condition for the emergence of Albert’s scientific programme. In the present volume, twelve leading scholars in the field offer studies that range from Albert’s early theological works to his late philosophical writings. The volume focuses on the teachings that Albert actively inherited from the Arabic sources, the ways in which he creatively implemented those teachings into his scientific corpus, and the effects that these implementations had on his own programmatic take on scientia.