The work on this revised edition was facilitated by the assistance of several friends and colleagues. In this context I would especially like to thank Finn Gredal Jensen, with whom I have often been in virtually daily contact during the time I was working on this tome. Finn selflessly helped with several things in connection with the research for this project, and my consultations with him have been invaluable. I am also most grateful to Gerhard Schreiber for his frequent assistance in locating old and rare works that I needed for my research. It is thanks to his efforts that I did not need to depart from my principle of using only first editions and original printings of the works under analysis here.
I have had the pleasure to benefit from the suggestions and criticisms of numerous internationally known experts in the Danish Golden Age. I remain in their debt for all that they have taught me: Klaus Müller-Wille, Nassim Bravo, Pier Francesco Corvino, Zoltán Gyenge, Mads Sohl Jessen, Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, István Czakó, Johnny Kondrup, Poul Houe, Elizabeth Li, Bertel Nygaard, Philipp Schwab, Ingrid Basso, George Pattison, and Nate Kramer. I would like to express my gratitude to the kind Jesper Tang Nielsen, Kim Arne Pedersen, and Anders Holm for assisting me with their expertise in Grundtvig.
I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences for their kind and never-ending help: Peter Šajda, Richard Sťahel, Róbert Karul, Jaroslava Vydrová, Eva Dědečková, František Novosád, Alžbeta Kuchtová, Ivana Kováčiková, and Lucia Jankovičová. I owe a great debt of gratitude to them all.
I would also like to thank my wife Katalin Nun Stewart, to whom this work is dedicated. In addition to making the original draft for cover design for all three tomes, she has been a great support for my research. Without her encouragement, this work would never have been realized.
Research for this work has benefited greatly from the resources of The Royal Library in Copenhagen. Most of the pictures that appear in the present study have come from its collections, for which I am very grateful.
This work was produced at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, v.v.i. It was supported by the Agency APVV under the project “Philosophical Anthropology in the Context of Current Crises of Symbolic Structures,” APVV-20-0137.