Unus de intelligentibus postremis loquentibus. Noteworthy Aspects of the Reception of al-Ġazālī in Albert the Great

This paper investigates a peculiar moment of the Latin reception of the Arabophone theologian and philosopher Abū Ḥāmid al-Ġazālī (d. 1111) in the works of Albert the Great (d. 1280). It focuses primarily on a rather atypical remark in Albert’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, which accurately describes al-Ġazālī as opposing the theory of the eternity of the world, and as the source, in connection with Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), of a particular philosophical argument concerning potentiality in the debate on the theory. Furthermore, it takes into account another peculiar description of al-Ġazālī offered in Albert’s Super Ethica, in which the Islamic thinker known in Europe as the most faithful follower of Avicenna is startlingly portrayed as a Jewish theologian. With the tools of doctrinal, philological, and broadly historical analysis, the paper investigates three interconnected but separate questions : (1) how Albert could have known that al-Ġazālī actually denied the eternity of the world, as opposed to the common view of the Latin Algazel as a believer in it ; (2) how Albert could have known about al-Ġazālī’s argument on potentiality, given that the source was an as yet untranslated work (al-Ġazālī’s Tahāfut al-falāsifa); and (3) what could account for the fact that Albert returned in later works to regarding al-Ġazālī as accepting the world’s eternity.