Rate My Professor Mark Alfano

Mark Alfano is Professor in the Department of Philosophy within the School of Humanities at Macquarie University. He earned his PhD from the Philosophy Program at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2011. His academic career includes postdoctoral fellowships at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and the Princeton University Center for Human Values, followed by an appointment as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He then served as Associate Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Technology at Delft University of Technology and as Professorial Fellow at Australian Catholic University. Alfano joined Macquarie University as Associate Professor from 2020 to 2024 before his promotion to Professor in 2025. He holds an ARC Australian Research Fellowship and is a member of the Ethics and Agency Research Centre and the Minds and Intelligences Research Centre.

Alfano employs methods from philosophy, psychology, and computer science to investigate social epistemology, moral psychology, and digital humanities. His research examines how individuals develop and sustain virtues, how values integrate into their lives, and how these influence perception, thoughts, feelings, deliberations, and actions. A key theme is the integration of normative philosophy with empirical psychology. He maintains a focus on Nietzsche, authoring Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology in 2019. Notable publications include Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Moral Psychology: An Introduction (Polity, 2016), Current Controversies in Virtue Theory (Routledge, 2015, editor), and Epistemic Situationism (Oxford University Press, 2017, editor). He edits the series The Moral Psychology of the Emotions for Rowman & Littlefield International, encompassing volumes on emotions such as gratitude, sadness, regret, hope, admiration, guilt, curiosity, contempt, anger, disgust, pride, compassion, and forgiveness. Alfano has published in leading journals including Philosophical Quarterly, Mind, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, The Monist, Erkenntnis, Synthese, and British Journal for the History of Philosophy. In 2025, he received an ARC Future Fellowship valued at $1,258,732 for the project ‘Building robust networks of trust in the Anthropocene,’ analyzing social media discourse on global warming to propose trust-enhancing interventions. His work has garnered over 3,000 citations and an h-index of 25.