What is ethics, and what can it ultimately make of a human being? In his mature ethical commentary, Ethica (ca. 1262), Albert the Great articulates a distinctive and wide-ranging vision of ethics within medieval philosophy. Far from treating ethics as a set of rules or a merely theoretical discipline, Albert presents it as a transformative practice aimed at forming the human in the affective part of his soul. In this book, I offer the first overall narrative interpretation of Albert’s Ethica as a unified philosophical project. Situating the work within Albert’s broader engagement with Aristotle’s natural philosophy, his epistemological anthropology, and his conviction that ethical knowledge must be realized in lived human action, I reconstruct the internal logic that governs Albert’s ethics from beginning to end. Ethics emerges not as a self-contained field, but as a discipline ordered toward human perfection. Drawing on Albert’s creative appropriation of sources such as Averroes, Eustratius, and al-Farabi, the book shows how Albert rethinks Aristotelian ethics through a vertical structure of ascent. Moral virtue and prudence, while indispensable, are not the final goal of ethical life. Rather, they form the necessary foundation for a vertical movement toward higher forms of excellence. Through moral, heroic, and ultimately divine virtue, the human is gradually ordered beyond the sphere of merely human goods toward intellectual fulfilment. By reading Albert’s ethics in dialogue with ancient Greek, Arabic, and Byzantine traditions, this study reveals a Peripatetic ethics that is a science of becoming good, and of becoming fully human.
