Abstract

One of Albert the Great’s dearest concerns throughout his career was the question of the good; the good which humans naturally desire and which culminates in ultimate happiness. In his earliest work, tellingly entitled De natura boni, Albert’s interest principally concerns epistemological and practical questions: How can we know wherein the good consists? How can we acquire it? Under what circumstances may we lose it and what is necessary to reacquire it? In this initial context, Albert relies on the Augustinian conception that the desired good lies in the “Good of all goods” and that its attainment in this contingent world takes place almost exclusively through moral conduct. With the inception of appropriating Aristotle’s complete Nicomachean Ethics, however, Albert’s conception of the good undergoes a fundamental shift. Based on an intellectualist anthropology according to which the human being is “solely intellect”, Albert advances the intellectual virtues as necessary condition for a...