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St. Albert on the Subject of Metaphysics and Demonstrating the Existence of God

St. Albert on the Subject of Metaphysics and Demonstrating the Existence of God

Noone, Timothy B.

Medieval Philosophy and Theology, vol. 2 (1992)

Abstract

In his comprehensive study of Thomas Aquinas’s Sen* tentia super Metaphysicam, James Doig introduces Albert the Great as one of the commentators whose interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Thomas intended to challenge. In particular, Doig alleges that Albert’s understanding of the formal object (or, in other terminology, the subject) of metaphysics is heavily indebted to the writings of Averroes, although the modern scholar acknowledges that Albert does not follow the Averroistic interpretation in all respects. Furthermore, Doig contends that Albert’s own Metaphysics following Averroes’s schema of metaphysical knowledge, contains no proof of the existence of God as the cause of being but simply relies on the proof of God as the cause of motion, as was developed in Aristotle’s Physics.

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