orsi[at]ut.ee

Welcome! Tere tulemast! Benvenuti!

My main philosophical interests lie in ethics, particularly in meta-ethics, value theory, moral psychology, and the history of ethics. 

As of 01.09.2022 I am Associate Professor in Theoretical Ethics (formerly in Practical Philosophy) at the Philosophy Department of the University of Tartu, Estonia. In 2017 I received a four-year Exploratory Personal Research Grant from ETAg, for a project on "Practical Metaethics". In early 2013 I received a four-year Start-up Personal Research Grant from the Estonian Research Council, for a project on "The Unity of Normative Discourse". In 2010-13 I was a Mobilitas Postdoctoral Researcher at the same university. Previously I had lectured at the University of Reading (2008-9). I received my PhD in Philosophy in December 2007 from Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy. In 2007 I also received an MPhil from the University of Reading. I did my BA and MA in philosophy at Università La Sapienza in Rome, during which I spent more than one year as a visiting student in Reading (yes, again), where I wrote most of my MA thesis.

RESEARCH

Books and special issues

The Guise of the Good: A Philosophical History was published by Routledge in 2023. Here is a video where I introduce the book. Here is a booklist where I recommend other books alongside mine.

In 2021 my edited special issue on The Modern Guise of the Good came out in Philosophical Explorations (24,1). My editorial can be found on pp. 1-4. In 2024 it was republished as a collection for Routledge.

In 2015 my book Value Theory was published by Bloomsbury. Here is a review by A. Garcia.

Articles

Some of the following articles can be found by clicking on the links below. Or feel free to email me for a copy. For abstracts see my page on PhilPapers.

And here is a reply to our paper by Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-020-01558-0 

          And here is Krister Bykvist's reply to this paper.

Reviews

Here is a copy of my PhD thesis (2007), "Normativity and Value", in which I critically examined the fitting attitude (or buck-passing) account of value and some of its rivals.

TEACHING AND SUPERVISION

I have taught on general meta-ethics, moral realism, value theory, Mill's utilitarianism, Hume's ethics, moral particularism, the philosophy and ethics of sexuality, moral psychology.

Here is a link to the courses I currently teach.

Here is a syllabus I have used for my meta-ethics courses.

Here is a syllabus for my courses on the philosophy and ethics of sexuality.

I enjoy supervising students in any of these and nearby areas. I have supervised many MA research theses (see here). I currently supervise two PhD students: Stijn van Gorkum (ethical naturalism), Sergei Sazonov (entitlement theories of property rights).

I have been Program Director of our philosophy MA and PhD programs in Tartu (2018-2021) and will be again from 2024.

I have served as coordinator for BalPhiN (Baltic Philosophy Network), a network comprising several Baltic and Nordic philosophy departments, mainly aimed at organizing intensive classes for MA students.