This post is the result of an exciting new collaboration between Campion Hall and Blackfriars: two academic communities at the heart of the University of Oxford run by the Jesuit and Dominican Orders respectively.
The new postholder will focus on Philosophy and Theology in the Catholic Tradition. He will teach in Blackfriars Studium, as well as contributing to the research mission of Campion Hall ‘to serve all things human’.
Daniel says:
“It is an extraordinary honour to be appointed to this position in which I will be contributing to Campion Hall’s numerous theoretical and practical initiatives focused on the common good and guided by their motto veritatem facientes in caritate – Doing the Truth in Love.”
Daniel is the youngest ever Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall. He grew up in Pella, Iowa, and after undergraduate studies in Nashville, Tennessee, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven and the Centre for Thomistic Studies in Houston, Texas.
Before coming to Oxford, he was a postdoctoral fellow on the neuroscience strand of the Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and the Sciences project at the University of Cambridge, directed by Professor Sarah Coakley. He was also a postdoctoral researcher on the Renewal of Natural Theology project directed by Professor Alister McGrath at the University of Oxford.
Daniel is currently a Research Fellow in the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. He is the principal investigator of the Conceptual Clarity Concerning Human Nature project sponsored by the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
He is the author of Necessary Existence and the Doctrine of Being in Avicenna’s Metaphysics of the Healing (Brill, 2020).
Daniel’s research at Campion Hall will focus on philosophical anthropology, the metaphysical understanding of the human person, and its implications for ethics and politics.
The post is fittingly named after the philosopher, Fr Frederick Copleston SJ, remembered especially for his celebrated radio debate on the existence of God with Bertrand Russell (1948). Students of philosophy will know of his monumental nine-volume History of Philosophy. Copleston is also noted for his book on the philosophical thought of the great Dominican thinker, Thomas Aquinas. Copleston was a one-time member of Campion Hall and the first D’Arcy Lecturer here.
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