About the essay
Avicenna (d. 1037) conceives of the world below the moon as arranged in eight strata from the centremost stratum of earth to the outermost stratum of fire. Murtha closely compares textual witnesses in which Avicenna propounds this model of the sublunary strata, and provides in the appendix to the essay translations of four of these texts, so as to reconstruct Avicenna’s theory of the structure of the natural world as a whole.
In this process, a certain complexity becomes the focus of the essay, namely that despite earth’s tendency toward the centre to be within water, earthen matter nevertheless protrudes above water as land and mountains. The fact that there is earth above water, according to numerous Arabic-speaking contemporaries and predecessors of Avicenna’s, is evidence of divine providence – the belief that God is caring toward creaturely existence – since only with this arrangement can humanity qua land-dwelling species exist. Murtha shows how Avicenna goes about explaining the existence of land and mountains, and that Avicenna evaluates his own novel theory in the same theological terms of his Arabic-speaking predecessors and contemporaries.
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The prize is a push in the back for Murtha, who expects to finish a dissertation that greatly expands on the essay's argument in 2024.