Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association

Volume 86, 2012

Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions

Katja Krause
Pages 213-229

Albert and Aquinas on the Ultimate End of Humans
Philosophy, Theology, and Beatitude

Albert and Aquinas present beatitude in their Commentaries on the Sentences in strikingly different ways. While Albert’s theory of beatitude is an account purely based on theological conceptions and sources, Aquinas makes extensive use of philosophers such as Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Avicenna, and Averroes. Recent scholarship has shown that Aquinas derived his philosophical argumentation for the beatific vision from Averroes’s conjunction theory. Yet the reasons for Albert’s and Aquinas’s disparate theories of beatitude have not yet been investigated. In this paper, I shall show that Albert’s and Aquinas’s divergent conceptions of the relationship between the two sciences of philosophy and theology explain their disparate theories of beatitude.