SOURCE: "The Individual Human Being in Saint Albert's Earlier Writings," in Albert the Great: Commemorative Essays, edited by Francis J. Kovach and Robert W. Shahan, University of Oklahoma Press, 1980, pp. 131-60.

In the following essay, Ducharme analyzes Albert's "ambiguous and puzzling" metaphysics of individual being and dicusses in detail his borrowings from Christian faith, Aristotle, the Doctors of the Church, and Neoplatonism..

The self-standing value of individual beings often appears as holding little interest for philosophers and metaphysicians. Since they are mainly preoccupied with the universal and the necessary, they grant scant recognition to the singular and the contingent and often seem to explain it away. Yet uneasiness pervades many of their theories. Our thinking and our language maintain uncanny links with the modest individual things, and philosophy has never succeeded in ignoring those links for a very long period without giving rise to a reaction. In the...