Abstract

This book pays tribute to Bernard of Chartes’s observation, “We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.” For Hauser’s translation of the texts of Philip the Chancellor, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas, along with his introduction to the same, reveals that, if there is any truth in the claim that the medieval thinkers lacked a sense of history, their commitment to the preservation and transmission of texts nevertheless shows that they understood that their own intellectual progress depended on maintaining continuity with the thought of their predecessors. Hauser writes that his original intention was simply to translate Aquinas’s Quaestio disputata de virtutibus in communi, but that in the course of translating, he discovered that, contrary to widespread opinion, Albert the Great had influenced Aquinas’s thinking on the virtues more than did Aristotle.