Late ancient and early medieval narratives often depict dreaming as a vertical and hierarchical process of influence that has its starting point in a higher entity and ends with the human being. This model of explanation seems to take a more horizontal approach with the advent of a new natural philosophy and medical works from Arabic milieu that put the psychosomatic processes of the human being into perspective. The general purpose of this paper is to assess to which extent Albert (...) the Great’s consideration of dreams can be taken as an example of this turning point. Specifically, it tries to show how his dream theory is articulated in De homine. The main hypothesis is that the Dominican friar advocated a materialistic account of dreams, in which the process of dream formation is explain as a flux of bodiness caused by a change in the thermal behavior of the body. (shrink)

Albert’s anthropology places the human being at the top of a hierarchy of living things in virtue of a unique feature – namely the intellect – that offers the possibility of transcending the changing realm of nature and of assimilating its possessor to their divine creator. Even though Albert, throughout his works, often defends the independence of the human intellect from matter and consequently from the body and senses, his works on natural philosophy seem to offer a different perspective. In (...) De animalibus, Albert considers the brain to be the divine member of the body responsible for the operations of sensation and, to a certain degree, of intellection. Thus, the entire humoral activity of the human body has a direct influence on the activity of the intellect, his divine nature notwithstanding. Accordingly, the main purpose of the present study is to point out how the classical humoral theory is integrated by Albert the Great in his physiological consideration for an explanation of the intellect placed between the murky boundaries of natural philosophy and metaphysics. (shrink)