Albert the Great: Commemorative Essays ed. by Francis J. Kovach and Robert W. Shahan (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 323 Albert the Great: Commemorative Essays. Edited with an Introduction by FRANCIS J. KOVACH and ROBERT W. SHAHAN. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. The seventh centenary of the death of Albert the Great has been the occasion for renewed interest in this great scientist, philosopher, and theologian of the thirteenth century. Several Festschriften have appeared , among which is this fine collection of essays. Clearly Albert has been overshadowed by his most illustrious disciple, Thomas Aquinas, who preceded his master in death by more than six years. Yet the older Dominican came to several important positions in his philosophy that were both original with him and passed on to Thomas. For example, Albert was the first to connect the principle of proportionate distance between two light sources with the problem of action at a distance, to mention only one such principle brought out in Kovach's essay contained here. This principle was taken up by Thomas also, and may well be considered the remote origin of the inverse square principle of contemporary field theory. Collections of essays are notorious for lacking unity, a difficulty all the more accentuated by multiplicity of authorship. Yet there is a surprising degree of cohesiveness to these nine contributions ~hich touch on every aspect of Albert's influence except the theological. Ralph Mclnerny provides the initial chapter, "Albert on Universals." Mclnerny's fine choice and analysis of texts surfaces two important aspects of Albert's thought. Albert groped and struggled with Neoplatonic . influences and interpretations of Aristotle; he also eventually arrived at many positions which strongly influenced Thomas. These facts of Albert's writings are true of much more than his treatment of universals, though not as well handled by some of the other contributors. The present work complements another commemorative volume, .Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto : Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), previously reviewed in this journal (Thomist, vol. 44), by including a treatment of the doctrine of time in Albert's commentary on IV Physics. Owing to his earlier treatments of this same topic in Aquinas and Augustine , John M. Quinn, O.S.A., is the logical choice to write "The Concept of Time in Albert the Great." The Platonic influences on Albert become more apparent in this second essay. Quinn moves from the dialectical development of the definition of time to the importance of the ' now' in Albert's treatment, concluding with the properties of time and its relationship to the soul. Fuller references to contemporary theories of time would 824 BOOK REVIEWS have been helpful. Yet Quinn's development of Albert's doctrine that time requires numerable matter, a numbering soul, and formal number does serve nicely to illumine the author's point that formal number applied to motion leads to a quasi-mathematical concept of time in Albert. " The Priority of Soul as Form and Its Proximity to the :first Mover: Some Aspects of Albert's Psychology in the First Two Books of His Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima" is the long title of the next essay by Ingrid Craemer-Ruegenberg, the only European contributor to this volume. In this short chapter the author outlines Albert's doctrine on the procession _of forms from the First Cause, then uses this as an instrument to interpret the Aristotelian passage at II De anima 9 on the necessity of a living body being organized. The third section of this chapter is an all-too-brief sketch of Albert's position on the unity and immortality of the human soul. That the author confined herself to the :first two books of the De anima is understandable, but lamentable. A fuller analysis of Albert's development of the active and passive intellect passages of III De anima would be welcome as a subsequent essay. What treatment of a medieval philosopher would be complete without some mention of esse? Leo Sweeney, S.J., has provided "The Meaning of Esse in Albert the Great's Texts on Creation in Summa de Greaturis and Scripta Super Sententias" to fill this need. His careful analysis of these texts, taken chronologically, is handled well. Once again Albert appears as...