Rachel Cohon

Professor
College of Arts and Sciences
Department: Philosophy

Expertise:
David Hume; virtue ethics; moral philosophy; reasons for action

Campus phone: (518) 442-4144
Campus email: [email protected]

Biography:

Professor Rachel Cohon's research interests include ethics, the philosophy of action, and the history of ethics. She is the author of Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication (Oxford University Press, 2008), a book reinterpreting Hume's meta-ethics and virtue ethics. She has also written a number of articles on Hume's moral and political philosophy and theory of the passions, and on systematic topics related to normative reasons for action.

Cohon edited a volume of articles on Hume's ethics, Hume: Moral and Political Philosophy (2001), and wrote the entry on Hume's moral and political philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. She is also interested in applied ethics and wrote the article on ethical issues pertaining to disability for the Encyclopedia of Bioethics (2003).

She teaches graduate courses in moral theory, including such topics as consequentialism vs. deontology vs. virtue ethics, moral realism, the normativity of ethics, and 18th century moral philosophy.

Cohon received her Ph.D. from UCLA.