Aristotelian Virtue and Happiness in a Neoplatonic Guise: The Philosophical Conception of Ethics by Albertus Magnus in Ethica.

• Applicant: Dr. Aurelia Maruggi
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 572017842

With his two commentaries, Super Ethica and Ethica, Albertus Magnus initiates a new phase in the philosophical interpretation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (=EN) in the Latin-Christian world of the 13th century. In these first complete Latin commentaries on the EN, Albert not only interprets Aristotle's Ethics, but also creatively continues it with his own philosophical agenda: in this way, he grounds ethics as an independent and philosophical discipline and establishes new connections between ethics, cosmology and noetic. This ambitious philosophical ethics clearly takes shape in his second commentary (Ethica): In contrast to the strongly hermeneutically orientated first literary commentary, Ethica presents itself as Albert's mature philosophical ambition to increasingly found the EN on new grounds by engaging in a conversation with Greek Neoplatonism and Arabic philosophy. Virtues and happiness represent two pillars of the Albertinian project: Albert reviews the original Aristotelian theory of virtues, reclassifies and redefines them and defines a close relationship between political and contemplative happiness. In this enterprise, the heroic virtues play a key role in the achievement of the highest intellectual happiness, which consists in the self-knowledge and contemplation of the acquired intellect (intellectus adeptus). The main aim of this postdoctoral project is to investigate the significance of Greek Neoplatonism for Albert's theory of virtue and happiness in Ethica. Albert establishes - according to a central hypothesis of this postdoctoral project - a philosophical conception of ethics strongly inspired by Neoplatonism, which incorporates, questions and rethinks Greek and Arabic philosophy. The influence of Greek Neoplatonism in Ethica will be examined with regard to three main topics: (1.) the virtues and their connection to contemplative happiness; (2.) the relationship of political to contemplative happiness; (3.) the (neo-)Platonic doctrine of the soul's self-knowledge as a reversion to itself. This third topic also covers the questions of the connection between ethics and noetic and the position of ethics as a science in the philosophical curriculum. The exploration of Albert´s Neoplatonic-influenced philosophical ethics will be realized in two closely linked project parts: The philosophical-historical and philosophical results in the three areas described above will be illustrated by a series of articles on Ethica I, VI, VII, IX and X, which will be published in English in internationally renowned journals. The main focus is on the question of how Albert reinterprets Aristotelian virtue and happiness by drawing on Greek Neoplatonism and transforming them in combination with Arabic philosophy. The philological part of the project consists of the preparation of a reliable Latin text of the selected passages from Ethica.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position