World Time versus Soul Time: Augustine in Albert the Great's Physics – Prof. Katja Krause

Oct 28, 2025

Prof. Katja Krause, a historian of science specializing in medieval thought, dives into Albert the Great's integration of Augustine within physics. She explores how philosophical methods and the hierarchy of sciences shape the understanding of world time versus soul time. Krause emphasizes the formative nature of disciplines and critiques modern academic approaches that overlook the transformative aspects of knowledge. By linking logic, physics, and metaphysics, she shows how these stages cater to intellectual growth and metaphysical contemplation, ultimately leading to a deeper understanding of reality.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Hot Seat And Timekeeping Joke

Krause mentions a planned discussion session where speakers will sit in a 'hot seat' to take questions.
She also jokes that Father Philip Neri will remind her about timekeeping if needed.

ADVICE

Let Formation Guide Scholarship

Let Albert's aim for formation interrogate modern historiographical habits when studying medieval thinkers.
Reinscribe textual, contextual, and systematic scholarship within the telos of human formation.

INSIGHT

Four Images Mask A Fifth

Modern images of knowledge (combat, transmission, contextualizing, systematic) each illuminate aspects but also obscure Albert's formative telos.
A fifth image, integrative anthropology, restores his central claim that sciencia perfects the knower.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Prof. Katja Krause analyzes Albert the Great’s synthesis of Augustine in his physics, showing how philosophical method, anthropological formation, and the hierarchy of sciences inform the integration of world time and soul time in medieval thought.

This lecture was given on June 16th, 2025, at Schloss St. Emmeram.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Prof. Katja Krause is a historian of science and a philosopher specializing in medieval thought and beyond. She received her PhD in 2014 from King’s College London for her dissertation entitled “Aquinas’ Philosophy of the Beatific Vision: A Textual Analysis of his Commentary on the Sentences in Light of Its Greek, Arabic, and Latin Sources.” After her doctorate, Krause was awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where she worked on a series of articles examining the empirical turn of the thirteenth century that emerged from the appropriation of Averroes’ commentaries on the corpus Aristotelicum. In 2016/17 she served as Assistant Professor in Medieval Thought at Durham University, UK, and in 2017/18 was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School, supported by the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina – Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften. Katja Krause is currently Leader of the Max Planck Research Group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul & Body, ca. 800–1650,” jointly with a professorship at the Technische Universität Berlin.

Prof. Katja Krause has recently completed the edited volumes Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation (edited with Maria Auxent and Dror Weil, Routledge 2022), Contextualizing Premodern Philosophy: Explorations of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin Traditions (edited with Luis Xavier López-Farjeat and Nicholas Oschman, Routledge 2023), and Albert the Great and His Arabic Sources: Medieval Science between Inheritance and Emergence (edited with Richard C. Taylor, Brepols 2024). Her translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences IV.49.2, with introductions and notes, appeared in autumn 2020 with Marquette University Press.

Keywords: Anthropological Formation, Augustinian Integration, Hierarchy Of Sciences, Human Cognition, Logic And Metaphysics, Medieval Curriculum, Philosophical Method, Scientific Ascent, Soul Time, World Time