Itamar Weinshtock Saadon

(Photo Credit: Ayala Haddad)

I'm a philosophy PhD candidate at Rutgers University, advised by Jonathan Schaffer, Andy Egan, Karen Bennett, and Gideon Rosen. Before that, I got my BA and MA in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I work mainly in metaethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. My research focuses on the metaphysical structure of normativity: how the normative relates to the non-normative, how different normative phenomena are related to one another in the order of metaphysical explanation, and how answers to these questions can bear on first-order normative debates, especially in epistemology.

In case you were wondering about my name: my first name is ‘Itamar’, and my last name is ‘Weinshtock Saadon’.

Publications

Knowledge and Action: What Depends on What? Oxford Studies in Epistemology, forthcoming. Finalist for the Marc Sanders Prize in Epistemology. [penultimate]

Oh, All the Wrongs I Could Have Performed! Or: Why Care about Morality, Robustly Realistically Understood (with David Enoch). The Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism, eds. David Copp and Paul Bloomfield, Oxford University Press, 2023. [journal] [penultimate]

Evolutionary Debunking of (Arguments for) Moral Realism (with Arnon Levy). Synthese, 2023. [journal] [penultimate]

A Dilemma for De Dicto Halakhic Motivation: Why Mitzvot Don’t Require Intention. Journal of Analytic Theology, 2022. [journal] [penultimate]

Work in Progress

Laws as Partial Grounds (with Karen Bennett and Audrey Powers). Invited for submission to Reductionism in Metaphysics, Meta-Ethics, and Philosophy of Mind, eds. Alex Moran and Ralf Bader, Oxford University Press.

Moral laws can explain particular moral facts by partly metaphysically grounding them (pace Selim Berker).

A paper on the structure of metaphysical explanations of normative supervenience (under review).

Specific normative supervenience facts are explanatorily prior to the general supervenience fact.

A paper on essentialist characterizations of normative non-naturalism (in preparation).

Essentialist characterizations of non-naturalism face a Euthyphro challenge.

Teaching

As primary instructor

Introduction to Ethics, Rutgers University, Summer 2026

Critical Reading in Philosophical Texts, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2019–2022

As teaching assistant

Introduction to Philosophy (instructor: Michael Glanzberg), Rutgers University, Fall 2024

Introduction to Logic (instructor: Meir Buzaglo), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2020–2021

Last updated: September 2026

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse