Profile

Mark Alfano is on leave from University of Oregon while he starts a new job as associate professor of philosophy at Delft University of Technology, where he has been treated with remarkable levels of basic decency and humanity.  

In 2011, he received his doctorate from the Philosophy Program of the City University of New York Graduate Center.  He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and the Princeton University Center for Human Values, as well as assistant professor of philosophy at University of Oregon starting in September 2013.  Alfano works on moral psychology, broadly construed to include ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology.  He also maintains an interest in Nietzsche, focusing on Nietzsche’s psychological views.  Alfano has authored papers for such venues as the Philosophical Quarterly, The Monist, Erkenntnis, Synthese, and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.  His first book, Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2013), argues that the situationist challenge to virtue ethics spearheaded by John Doris and Gilbert Harman should be co-opted, not resisted. He also has two other monographs, three edited volumes, and one books series forthcoming or under contract.