Abstract

The article traces the peculiar position that natural philosophy takes within Albert the Great’s system of sciences. Natural philosophy studies a wide range of topics, both the particular phenomena as well as their causes. Thus natural philosophy occupies a space between medicine on its ‘lower’ end, and metaphysics on its ‘higher’ end. In the first part of the article I study the complex relation between natural philosophy and medicine. In the second part I determine Albert’s position on the respective tasks of the natural philosopher and the metaphysician. In the third part I trace these relations between the disciplines by taking the example of melancholy. Melancholy, a concept that comprises bodily and super-natural effects, exemplifies the wide stretch that natural philosophy has to make in order to reflect on the multifariousness of the natural world as well as on the peculiar position of the human being as a nexus Dei et mundi.