Kris McDaniel

Kris McDaniel is the William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, affiliated with the College of Arts and Letters and the Department of Philosophy. His research focuses on metaphysics, the history of philosophy, and ethics, with notable contributions to ontology, modal realism, mereology, and grounding theory. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (2004) and has been a faculty member at Syracuse University (2004–2019) before joining Notre Dame in 2019.

• Education: BA from Western Washington University (1998), Ph.D. from University of Massachusetts-Amherst (2004).
• Key Works: The Fragmentation of Being (2017, Sanders Book Prize winner), This is Metaphysics (2020), and over 50 articles on metaphysical topics.
• Awards: 2018 Sanders Book Prize for The Fragmentation of Being.

His research explores ontological pluralism, the nature of being, and historical figures like Kant, McTaggart, and Heidegger. He has edited volumes and contributed to debates on essential properties, composition, and normative metaphysics.

McDaniel’s teaching spans undergraduate and graduate courses in metaphysics, ethics, and the history of philosophy. He has advised numerous doctoral students and serves on editorial boards for journals like Ergo and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.