Metaphysics

Albert sees the human intellect as a similitude of the separate intellect, extrinsic to matter and body. With Albert’s refutation of the theory of the unity of the intellect we reach the core of the difficult question of his relationship to Averroes. Albert rejects clearly the monopsychist idea of the unity of the possible intellect he attributes to different philosophers (and not to Averroes proper) and advocates for a plurality of intellects. But the agent intellect as a part of human soul is itself an emanation of the separated agent intellect, extrinsic to the body and independent from him, so it is not essentially the substantial form of it. This theory leads to his adoption of the peripatetic theory of the conjunction of human soul to separate inteect, itself linked to his conception of human felicity.

Albert’s metaphysical thought is clearly determined by his conception of the relationships between Metaphysics and what he considers as Aristotle’s theology (the “philosophical” theology, the eminent part of metaphysics, to be distinguished from the Christian theology founded in revelation). It is not contained in book Lambda of the Metaphysics, but in the Liber de causis. This text, a Latin translation of an Arabic adaptation (realized in the circle of al-Kindl) of a collection of propositions taken from Proclus’ Elements of Theology is considered by Albert as an Aristotelian synthesis, which contains the authentic peripatetic teaching on the subject of the first cause and primary causes. He develops what we would today call a Christian version of the neoplatonic theory of emanation, clearly distinguished from the Latin Avicennian theory of the Dator formarum (which Albert considered as Plato’s position). His theory of the influx incorporates the Aristotelian hylemorphism, through the famous theory of the education (eductio) of forms. It leads to a reconstruction of the Arabic and Greek peripatetism he finds in Alexander, Avicenna, Averroes, al-FarabI, al-Kindl, and others authors (some of them Jewish, as ‘‘David,’’ the author of the collection which constitutes the Liber de causis according to Albert) and corrects through his reading of Pseudo-Dionysius.

His position on the problem of universals is to be considered as a part of his metaphysics, much more than logic, both because of his avicennian position on the “accidental” role of significant expressions in logic - the universality of the logical predicate being systematically based upon the communicability of a real nature - and because his solution is mainly rooted on a Avicennian theory of essence combined with his conception of a Christianized version of the ‘‘neo-platonic’’ theory of the three states of the universal (ante rem = form pre-contained in the first cause, in re = immanent universals, post rem = abstracted concepts). This synthesis is itself founded on a conception of the causality (the essence being an ideal cause which pre-contains things) Albert has conceived with the Liber de causis and Pseudo-Dionysius.