David McPherson is Professor of Philosophy in the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida as well as Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University, and during academic year 2021-22 he was Visiting Research Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. McPherson works in the areas of ethics (especially virtue ethics), political philosophy, meaning in life, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of The Virtues of Limits (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2020), as well as the editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

McPherson is currently the project leader for a three-year Templeton-funded grant project on “Spiritual Yearning and the Problem of Spiritual Alienation,” which will result in his third book monograph titled Spiritual Alienation and the Quest for God as well as an edited volume titled Spiritual Yearning in an Age of Secularization: Philosophical, Psychological, and Sociological Perspectives. Spiritual Alienation and the Quest for God articulates, explores, and responds to the problem of spiritual alienation, which is the state of being estranged from the place of our spiritual fulfillment. This book contends that spiritual alienation is a perennial feature of the human condition but is also exacerbated within the conditions of modernity. It also seeks to show how it is integrally connected with our spiritual yearnings in giving rise to them.