Rate My Professor William Mcdonald

William McDonald is Adjunct Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of New England. He earned his BA with Honours and Diploma of Education from the University of New England and his PhD in philosophy from the University of Sydney. His academic interests encompass Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Foucault, along with comparative philosophy of religion, philosophical psychology, the history of philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. McDonald has an extensive teaching career across international institutions, including the University of Sydney, the University of Copenhagen, the University of New England, the American University of Central Asia, the United Arab Emirates University, and Ashoka University in India. He has also secured research fellowships in Denmark, the USA, Australia, the UK, and the Slovak Republic.

As an internationally recognized Kierkegaard scholar, William McDonald has made significant contributions to the field through his editorial and authorial work. He co-edited the comprehensive six-tome series Kierkegaard’s Concepts (Routledge, 2013–2015), covering topics from Absolute to Writing. Notable chapters include “Aesthetic/Aesthetics,” “Anxiety,” “Philosophy/Philosophers,” “Demonic,” “Despair,” “Faith,” “Hope,” “Love,” “The Moment,” and “Music.” He authored influential encyclopedia entries on Søren Kierkegaard for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Literary Encyclopedia. Furthermore, he produced the first English translation of Kierkegaard’s Prefaces: Light Reading For Certain Classes As The Occasion May Require, By Nicolaus Notabene (Florida State University Press, 1989). Other key publications feature “Sympathy for Dolores: Moral Consideration for Robots based on Virtue and Recognition” (2019), “Kierkegaard’s Demonic Boredom” (2009), and contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard (2013) and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Existentialism (2024). His scholarship has notably impacted studies in existentialism, continental philosophy, and philosophical psychology.