Rate My Professor Pekka Väyrynen

Pekka Väyrynen is Professor of Moral Philosophy and Deputy Head of School (Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science) in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. He joined the university as Senior Lecturer in 2008 and was promoted to Professor in 2013. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis from 2002 to 2008. Väyrynen earned his PhD in Philosophy from Cornell University in 2002, holds an MA in Philosophy, and an M Soc Sci in Practical Philosophy. His research focuses on metaethics, encompassing the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of ethics; value theory; practical reason; normative ethics; philosophy of language; metaphysics; epistemology; and the nature of explanation in ethics and other normative domains. Specific interests include the semantics and metasemantics of normative and evaluative language, the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics and normativity.

Väyrynen has authored the book The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty: A Study of Thick Concepts in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2013), the first book-length treatment of thick concepts. Notable publications include 'Normative Explanation and Justification' (Noûs, 2021), 'Normative Explanation Unchained' (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2021), 'Grounding and Normative Explanation' (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 2013), 'Thick Concepts: Where’s Evaluation?' (Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 2012), 'Moral Generalism: Enjoy in Moderation' (Ethics, 2006), and 'Resisting the Buck-Passing Account of Value' (Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 2006). He serves as Associate Editor of Ethics and ethics section editor for Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, and was an output assessor for the Philosophy Sub-Panel of REF2021. His research has received grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme. Väyrynen supervises PhD dissertations in moral philosophy, particularly on topics such as the nature of explanation in ethics, semantics of normative language, metaphysics and epistemology of ethics, and metaethics generally. He is affiliated with the Centre for Aesthetic, Moral and Political Philosophy and the Centre for Theoretical Philosophy at Leeds.