Professor Pekka Väyrynen
- Position: Professor of Moral Philosophy and Deputy Head of School (Philosophy/HPS)
- Areas of expertise: metaethics; value theory; practical reason; normative ethics
- Email: P.Vayrynen@leeds.ac.uk
- Phone: +44(0)113 343 1890
- Location: G.07 Botany House
- Website: Pekka Väyrynen personal website | Googlescholar | ORCID
Profile
I joined University of Leeds as Senior Lecturer in 2008 before being promoted to Professor in 2013. I obtained my PhD from Cornell University in 2002. From 2002 until 2008 I was Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of California-Davis.
More information about my work and career can be found on my personal website.
Responsibilities
- Deputy Head of School (Philosophy and HPS)
Research interests
My research is in moral philosophy, with a primary focus on metaethics. Other areas of interest relevant to my work include philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. I have published on a wide range of topics in metaethics concerning the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of ethics. My research has been supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme.
I’d be delighted to help construct and supervise PhD or postdoc projects on a wide range of topics in moral philosophy. At the moment I’m particularly interested in the nature of explanation in ethics and other normative domains, but I maintain strong interests in most topics under the semantics and metasemantics of normative and evaluative language, the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics and other normative domains, the nature of normativity, and really almost anything under metaethics. Please feel welcome to drop me a line if you’d like to discuss the match of your interests with mine.
Services to the profession which reflect my research interests include serving as an Associate Editor of Ethics, an ethics section editor for Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy, and an output assessor for the Philosophy Sub-Panel of REF2021.
<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>Qualifications
- PhD Philosophy
- MA Philosophy
- M Soc Sci Practical Philosophy
Professional memberships
- Aristotelian Society
- British Philosophical Association
- British Society for Ethical Theory
Student education
I lead and teach on modules in moral philosophy and supervise undergraduate final year projects, Master's theses, and PhD dissertations.
Research groups and institutes
- Centre for Aesthetic, Moral and Political Philosophy
- Centre for Theoretical Philosophy
- Philosophy