Donald Phillip Verene (born October 24, 1937^[1]) is an American philosophy professor and author. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Emory University.^[2]

Donald Verene was born in Galesburg, Illinois.^[1] He studied at Knox College in his hometown, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1959.^[1] He earned his doctorate in philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis in 1964.^[2]

Verene is married to Molly Black Verene.^[1] Their son, Chris Verene is a photographer.

Verene is a lecturing academic at Emory University.^[2] He was editor of Philosophy and Rhetoric from 1976 to 1987.^[3] From 1982 to 1988, he was the Chair of Emory's Department of Philosophy.

Considered a worldwide authority on Giambattista Vico, he leads Emory's Center for Vico Studies and edits New Vico Studies.^[2] His wife, Molly Black Verene,^[1] serves as Assistant Director of the Center.^[3]

He also serves on the Board of Visitors for Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college in Savannah, Georgia.^[4]

Verene was a visiting fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford in 1988. He was a visiting scholar at La Sapienza University of Rome in 1996.^[3] He is also a Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.^[5]

Verene is the author of Vico’s Science of Imagination (Cornell, 1992)^[6] and Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (Yale, 1997).^[7]

Other publications written by Verene include:

• Vico and Joyce (Cornell 1987)
• Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (SUNY, 1985)
• The Art of Humane Education (Cornell, 2002)
• The History of Philosophy: A Reader's Guide Including a List of 100 Great Philosophical Works from the Pre-Socratics to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Northwestern, 2008)