I am a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Moral and Political Philosophy. My research interests are in metaethics (especially moral epistemology), philosophy of perception, and epistemology.
I have spent the last several years working on developing a wholly perceptual account of moral knowledge, and attempting to use this account to respond to traditional epistemological objections to moral realism. I started working on these issues in my dissertation, but (as is often the case with dissertations), my ambitions were too big and thus the dissertation only ended up defending the plausibility of the broader project. So I'm now focusing on working out some of the details and applications of the theory. Some of this work was generously funded by a grant from the Israel Science Foundation, entitled "Moral Perception: How It Works and Why It Matters".
More recently, I have been working a bit on some of the metasemantic puzzles that arise for moral realists.
I also frequently find myself working on other issues in metaethics and philosophy of perception, as well as even more tangentially related stuff such as philosophy of mind and political philosophy, because too many things are interesting. For other research and publications, see my Research page.
I can be contacted at pjwerner1 at gmail.com
Research shows that viewing cute animals can increase performance in certain tasks. Here is my dog Mose:
