Albert the Great and his Arabic Sources, ed. by Katja Krause and Richard C. Taylor, Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions of the Middle Ages, 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), pp. 9–42 10.1484/M.PATMA-EB.5.136481 KATjA KRAUSE AND RICHARD C. TAYLOR  Chapter 1. Introduction. Albert’s Philosophical scientia Origins, Geneses, Emergences Wagner. Ach Go! die Kunſt iſt lang; Und kurz iſt unſer Leben. Mir wird, bey meinem kritiſchen Beſtreben, Doch oſt um Kopf und Buſen bang’. Wie ſchwer nd nicht die Miel zu erwerben, Durch die man zu den Quellen ſteigt! Und eh’ man nur den halben Weg erreicht, Muß wohl ein armer Teufel ſterben. Fauſt. Das Pergament, iſt das der heil’ge Bronnen, Woraus ein Trunk den Durſt auf ewig ſtillt? Erquickung haſt du nicht gewonnen, Wenn e dir nicht aus eigner Seele quillt. 1 Albert the Great (c. 1200–80) was one of the great philosophers, if not the great- est, among the thirteenth-century Scholastics. Yet he has been under-appreciated by modern scholars, who tend to focus on his far more famous student, omas 1 Goethe, Faust: Ein Fragment, p. 15. e English translation (Goethe, Faust, trans. Taylor, pp. 48–49) runs as follows. ‘WAGNER: Ah, God! but Art is long, | And Life, alas! is fleeting. | And oſt, with zeal my critic-duties meeting, | In head and breast there’s something wrong. | How hard it is to compass the assistance | Whereby one rises to the source! | And, haply, ere one travels half the course | Must the poor devil quit existence. FAUST: Is parchment, then, the holy fount before thee, | A draught wherefrom thy thirst forever slakes? | No true refreshment can restore thee, | Save what from thine own soul spontaneous breaks’. This is an open access chapter distributed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International License.