This monograph on Avicennaâs metaphysics is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation. I want to thank again R.E. Houser, Andrea Robiglio, Thomas Osborne, Thérèse-Anne Druart, and Mary Catherine Sommers for their encouragement, comments, and criticisms of my doctoral thesis, which I have tried to integrate into the present text. I am especially grateful to Dr. Houser whose lectures and research on Avicenna inspired this study, and whose guidance helped me to shape and bring to completion my dissertation just in the nick of time. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Druart for her meticulous corrections and insightful comments on numerous drafts of the dissertation manuscript, which made the task of later revision more manageable for me. I thank Richard Taylor who, through the Aquinas and âthe Arabsâ Project and in many other ways, has unceasingly supported me and has enabled me to follow paths of research I would not have dreamed of pursuing.
Over the course of my doctoral and postdoctoral studies there were many friends, colleagues, and professors who helped me in various ways with my dissertation and its later revisions. I must especially acknowledge all the prayers, encouragement, recommendations, or criticisms that I received from Brandon Dahm, Fr Jeff Dole, Mark Anderson, Ben Smith, Ted Rebard, Luca Gili, Alberto Kobec, the community at Keizersberg Abbey, Domenic DâEttore, Therese Cory, Stephen Ogden, Eric Mabry, Nathan Poage, Ryan Womack, Jeremy Wilkins, Clint Brand, Edward Macierowski, David Twetten, Luis Xavier López-Farjeat, Jon McGinnis, Deborah Black, Peter Adamson, Jules Janssens, Wahid Amin, Amos Bertolacci, Tony Street, and many others. I thank Riccardo Strobino, who was kind enough to share with me draft versions of his unpublished translation of Avicennaâs KitÄb al-BurhÄn. I thank Mohammad Saleh Zarepour for the many conversations on Avicenna we had at Clare Hall and for his help on numerous parts of this book. I am grateful to Sarah Coakley for her frequent reminders and encouragement which kept me working on this book during my postdoctoral research with her at the University of Cambridge, which was generously funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. I am thankful to Alister McGrath, Andrew Pinsent, and the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford for supporting me in my present postdoctoral fellowship on natural theology. John Marenbon has been so kind and supportive of my work and I appreciate all he has done to help me bring this book to publication in
During my doctoral studies I received scholarships and institutional support from the Center for Thomistic Studies, University of St. Thomas, the DeWulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, at the Catholic University of Leuven, the Belgium American Educational Foundation, and the American Catholic Philosophical Association, which I gratefully acknowledge.
I started studying philosophy in earnest thanks to my undergraduate encounters with Mark Anderson at the weekly Philologoi gatherings he hosted. Anderson was my first teacher and it was his philosophical way of life that inspired his many Belmont University undergraduate students, like myself, to pursue philosophical enquiries. I am exceptionally grateful to him for awakening in me the love of wisdom.
Finally, I am overwhelmingly grateful to my parents, brother, sister, and my wife, Viktoria, for their prayers, patience, and love. And to you my beautiful baby daughter, Sophia Therese, thank you for sleeping so peacefully while I completed the final revisions of this book.
Daniel De Haan
February 29, 2020
Oxford