Abstract
Albert the Great (1200-1280) has too often been portrayed as an unoriginal and merely encyclopedic thinker who relies heavily on his sources, especially in his commentaries on Aristotle. This misleading picture of his philosophical efforts is thor oughly questioned and ultimately overturned in this article: Albert uses his commentaries on Aristotle in a very constructive manner to establish an overarching system of the sciences which uses the Corpus Aristotelicum but also seeks to complement and to perfect it. In a case study on his notion of happiness, it is demonstrated how Albert draws creatively on different sources (especially from an Arabic philosophy of mind) in order to design a completely new understanding of the ultimate aim of the philosophical life. Thus his two commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics highlight the fact that in Albert’s handling philosophical commentaries are a heteronomous genre where autonomous thinking can take place: For Albert, commenting on a text (or a corpus of texts) in such a transformative manner is tantamount to doing philosophy in its own right. The analysis which is provided to reach and justify this conclusion in the article also throws some light on the questions of why Albert wrote two commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics and how their relationship can be understood with a view to his overarching philosophical purpose.
