Fennie pray a cost in the news

and there's to all of physical

and bless you all of physical.

He bless you, Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at www. History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode Animal Animal Vegetable Mineral, Albert the Great's natural philosophy.

What do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common, their middle name.

And the same goes for the subject of today's episode, who has something else in common with

both of them.

Like Alexander, he had a close working relationship with Aristotle. And like

Winnie the Pooh, he was interested in exploring the animal world and went so far as to undertake

a personal inspection of beehives, though as far as I'm aware his voluminous writings never mention a hefelump.

Nor did he restrict his research to animals.

Indeed there was little or nothing in the universe that escaped his interest.

Apt then that he was known as the Universal Doctor, and already honored in his own time with

the title Albertus Magnus, Albert the Great.

The admiration was, however, less universal than the scope of Albert's intellectual ambitions.

Roger Bacon believed he was, if not a bear of very little brain, then a master of very little training.

Albert heard no philosophy and was not taught by anyone, complained Bacon, and was one of many authors to write in Latin, who was misled by the

poor standard of translations into this language, having himself no facility in Greek or Arabic. There is a grain of truth in these harsh judgments in that Albert did not enjoy the sort of education Bacon would have seen as indispensable for work in natural philosophy.

He hailed from Lowingen in Sveia, though his career would later give him a particularly strong connection to Cologne.

Born around the turn of the 13th century, Albert joined the Dominican Order as a young man, by which time he was living in Padua.

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